About

I am currently an NSERC CREATE-funded postdoc at Western University in London, Ontario working with Jessica Grahn, Marc Joanisse, & Laurel Trainor at McMaster University. Together we're looking at how rhythmic regularity in music affects the way listeners of all ages track the rhythms of speech. We are currently studying the neural tracking of speech in children with and without dyslexia and will determine whether putting words to music could help poor readers track the rhythms of speech just as well as their typically developing peers.

My research investigates several perceptual, cognitive, and neural fundamentals for human communication. I study how children learn about music, language, and everyday sounds in real world listening settings, with the goal of understanding the skills children must acquire to learn to communicate in the real world. The main findings of my research show that a) from infancy, we are biased to attend to the human voice in scenes with many different sounds competing for our attention; b) we can apply musical and linguistic knowledge to shape our perception of specific acoustic dimensions, like pitch; and c) adults are better at neurally tracking speech rhythms when sentences are sung rather than spoken.

Find out more by visiting the UWO & McMaster lab websites:

• Language, Reading, and Cognitive Neuroscience Lab

• Music and Neuroscience Lab

• Auditory Development Lab