The research will take place in the Research Department of Speech Hearing and Phonetic Sciences (SHaPS). SHaPS regroups 9 academic staff, 10 postdoctoral staff and around 20 PhD students and is reputed for its research on (1) first and second language acquisition, (2) the neural basis of speech perception and production, (3) hearing impairment and developmental disorders, (4) within- and across-speaker variability amongst other strengths. SHaPS is a grouping within the Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, which brings together cognition, neuroscience, linguistics, speech sciences and clinical groupings. The Division of Psychology and Language Sciences is one of the largest centres of its kind in Europe and top-ranked for psychology and speech sciences in the UK’s recent national research assessment exercise. UCL itself ranks within the top 10 universities worldwide in a range of league tables.
Projects to be hosted
- ESR3 Impact of acoustic enrichment on ease of processing
- ESR4 Impact of linguistic enrichment on the perception of highly-degraded speech
Key Research Facilities, Infrastructure and Equipment
- high-quality speech recordings, with an anechoic chamber
- suite of sound-treated rooms for behavioural speech perception testing
- listening booths
- artificial ear
- sound level meter
- audiometer
- wired and wireless mikes
- facilities for neuro studies of speech perception: 3 EEG systems and, a TMS lab
- facilities for audiovisual speech research: studio-quality recordings and feature tracking
- eye-trackers
- fMRI
- motion capture lab