Miranda writes: I am in the process of finishing up my PhD dissertation in the Department of Psychology and Program in Cognitive Science at Indiana University Bloomington. I should be defending in early November of this year. My general area of research is speech perception and spoken word recognition, and I work with Dr. David Pisoni, the director of IUB's Speech Research Laboratory. My work with Dr. Pisoni over the last six years has focused on trying to account for the large individual differences observed in prelingually-deafened children's success at acquiring spoken language via a cochlear implant. (A cochlear implant is a prosthetic device that uses a multichannel electrode array surgically implanted inside a patient's cochlea to transmit an electrically-coded representation of the speech signal directly to the auditory nerve.) A lot of our research is concerned with looking at children's short-term/working memory for sequences of stimuli presented in the auditory versus visual/spatial sensory modalities.
I am interested in the clinical population of pediatric cochlear implant users both for its own sake (in terms of accounting for benefit received from use of the device) and for what it can potentially tell us about speech perception and spoken language acquisition in normal-hearing children. My thesis project addresses another of my related interests by looking at how how normal-hearing children and hearing-impaired children who use cochlear implants perceive variation in acoustic properties that serve to differentiate between the voices of different talkers.
If there are any students considering grad school in the area of speech perception, and have questions about the whole grad school experience, I'd be happy to give them my take on things.
