Phone:
(608) 262-9884
or
(608) 262-6110
Office: 528 Psychology
Speech and Perception Laboratory
Keith R. Kluender
Professor
Ph. D. 1988, Unversity of Texas
Email: krkluend@wisc.edu
All of our research is designed to help us better understand how people hear complex sounds such as speech, how experience shapes the way he hear our world, and how we use what we hear to guide our actions and to communicate. These questions inspire us to be interdisciplinary in our thinking and experimental methods. Our work is at an intersection between traditional problems in perception, cognitive psychology, communication disorders, computer science, electrical engineering, linguistics, neuroscience, and philosophy. We always begin with quite general principles of perception, and our work is frequently informed by approaches to analogous issues for vision, particularly information theory and Bayesian models.
Our research questions encourage the use of many experimental tools. We study the performance of human listeners in a broad array of psychophysical and learning tasks. We use neurophysiological data to reveal auditory processes and to inform models of learning and plasticity. We use computational simulations of hearing and learning to generate and test new hypotheses. Although our emphasis is upon basic questions, our work is being extended to clinical problems of hearing impairment and language delay, and to practical solutions such as cochlear prosthetics (implants), hearing aid design, and computer speech recognition.
REPRESENTATIVE PUBLICATIONS
Kluender, K.R., Stilp, C.E., & Kiefte, M. (in press). “Perception of vowel sounds within a biologically realistic model of efficient coding”. Chapter to appear inVowel-Inherent Spectral Change(Springer).
Stilp, C.E., Rogers, T.T., & Kluender, K.R. (2010). “Rapid efficient coding of correlated complex acoustic properties.”Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 107(50), 21914-21919.
Stilp, C.E., Kiefte, M., Alexander, J.M., & Kluender, K.R. (2010). “Cochlea-scaled spectral entropy predicts rate-invariant intelligibility of temporally distorted sentences.”Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 128, 2112-2126.
Coady, J.A., Evans, J.L, & Kluender, K.R. (2010). “The role of phonotactic frequency in sentence repetition by children with specific language impairments.”Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 53, 1401-1415.
Stilp, C.E., & Kluender, K.R. (2010). “Cochlea-scaled spectral entropy, not consonants, vowels, or time, best predicts speech intelligibility.”Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 107(27), 12387-12392.
Stilp, C.E., Alexander, J.M., Kiefte, M., & Kluender, K.R. (2010). “Auditory color constancy: Calibration to reliable spectral characteristics across speech and nonspeech contexts and targets.”Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 72(2), 470-480.
Alexander, J.M., & Kluender, K.R. (2009). “Spectral tilt change in stop consonant perception by listeners with hearing impairment.”Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 52, 653-670.
Kluender, K.R. & Alexander, J.M. (2008). "Perception of speech sounds." In A.I. Basbaum, A. Kaneko, G.M. Shepard, & G. Westheimer, (Eds.),The Senses: A Comprehensive Reference, Vol. 3, Audition, P. Dallos & D. Oertel (Eds.), pp. 829-860,. San Diego: Academic Press