Meet the Language and Brain Lab
Meet the senior members of the Language and Brain Lab (2024)
Dr. Emily Myers is the Director of the Language and Brain Lab and a Professor in the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences. Her research attempts to unlock the mysteries of how the human brain understands language, and to use that knowledge to help people with language disorders.
Dave Saltzman graduated from Providence College in 2013 with a BS in Psychology, but his first experience with research was in the Word Recognition and Auditory Perception lab at Villanova University where he finished his MS in Psychology in 2016. There, Dave looked at how listeners adapt to changes in speaking rate, and which cues are most important for that process. Now, he studies how listeners generalize accent information across talkers, and how this process changes with age, while tackling these questions: Why, as we age, is it more difficult to quickly adapt to accented speech? How much accent information do we use from previously encountered talkers?
Dave graduated with his PhD in July 2024 and is now working in insurance.
Hannah Mechtenberg started her journey at Colorado State University for her undergraduate degree and majored in Neuroscience with a concentration in Cognitive and Behavioral Science and minored in Biomedical Sciences. From there, she joined the LAB Lab as the lab manager and stayed here for graduate school. Hannah investigates whether reward matters for learning the individual ways people produce their speech sounds, using a variety of methods. She hopes that the results can inch us closer to understanding the mechanism behind our incredible ability to adapt to every person’s unique way of speaking. In the future, Hannah wants to look into the question of whether accurate speech perception is inherently rewarding. In her spare time, she loves to be outside hiking, cycling, and rock climbing.
Hannah started The Spoken Word in 2018.
Anne Marie Crinnion completed her bachelors degree at Harvard University, with a degree in Psychology, and since then has come to the LAB Lab and works with James Magnuson and Emily Myers. Anne Marie studies age-related hearing loss (ARHL). Natural listening environments contain a variety of cues that listeners can rely on to aid in speech comprehension. Her goal is to test the hypothesis that these individual patterns of cue use will explain differences in speech comprehension and to examine at what point in processing these individual differences arise using neural data collected from electroencephalography (EEG) and behavioral tasks. In her free time, Anne Marie enjoys crossword puzzles, running, and teaching fitness classes!
Naomi Sellers majored in Linguistics and English at Regis University. Naomi researches how people might exert different amounts of effort when listening to sentences in noisy environments. She uses pupillometry to record the changes in pupil size while participants listen to sentences. Changes in pupil size correspond to differences in a number of cognitive processes like effort, directed attention, and surprise. In the future, she wants to dive deeper into how different people might vary in how sensitive they are to the predictability of a sentence context, and how use of prediction and predictive information might impact clinical strategies. In her free time, Naomi enjoys distance running and dancing.
Portia Washington is currently investigating the extent to which phonetic category structure is related to perceiving speech in an unfamiliar accent. She examines the relationship between the data derived from the Visual Analog Scale (VAS) task and an accented speech perception task, using fMRI and behavioral tasks. In the future, Portia is interested in the effects of using gamification in treatments with older adults, and the following questions: How does linguistic diversity affect speech perception, and does linguistic diversity affect treatment outcomes in aphasia?
In her free time, Portia loves serving her community and anything involving visual arts. She's an occasional art teacher for CT DOJ working specifically with students in juvenile facilities.
Portia has taken over as Editor-in-chief for The Spoken Word as of fall 2024.
Matt Phillips completed his undergraduate thesis about speech and non-speech processing in people who stutter using behavioral methods, and his master’s thesis with Tammie Spaulding used a mixedmethods survey to investigate what people who stutter found most and least helpful about speech therapy. Up next, Matt is applying to positions to complete a clinical fellowship in speechlanguage pathology, with plans to pursue a PhD specializing in stuttering in the future! In his spare time, Matt likes going to the gym, taking walks around campus, and baking!
Matt left the LAB Lab in 2024 to work full time as a speech-language pathologist.