Research Seminar - The MARCS Institute

Dr Varghese Peter, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Speech and Language, MARCS Institute will be presenting "Neural Processing of Stress and Phrase Boundaries in Speech and Music".

Abstract: Both speech and music comprise sequences of rapid and complex acoustic events. To better understand the meaning of speech or music, a listener needs to segments the complex acoustic signal into smaller, meaningful segments. The segmentation process is eased by stress and phrase boundary cues in speech and music. The general aim of the research was to see whether stress and phrase boundaries in speech and music are processed in a similar way in the brain using two neuroimaging methods: EEG (electroencephalography) and MEG (magnetoencephalography). The overall results showed many similarities in the processing of stress and phrase boundaries in speech and music, indicating sharing of neural resources between speech and music.