Prof Bryan Gick Seminar

Date: Monday 12th August 2019, 2.00pm-3.00pm
Venue: Room 3.610, Level 3, Australian Hearing Hub, Macquarie University
Speaker: Professor Bryan Gick, University of British Columbia
Host: Dr Mike Proctor
Topic: Cross-modal speech perception through (some of) the somatosenses

Abstract
Cross-modal speech perception studies have focused largely on two sense modalities: Auditory and visual. Comparatively few studies have considered the role of any of the many distinct somatosenses (from temperature or pressure senses to vibrotactile or aerotactile senses, etc.). Almost all of those speech studies that have considered any of these other sense modalities have agglomerated them under a single “tactile” or “somatosensory” modality. The present talk outlines over a decade of research from our group in which we have studied how the somatosenses may play distinct roles in speech perception, and how they can work together with other modalities to facilitate speech perception for a range of populations.

Bio
Bryan Gick, FRSC, is a Professor and Guggenheim Fellow in the Department of Linguistics at the University of British Columbia and a Senior Scientist at Yale’s Haskins Laboratories. Co-director of UBC Language Sciences, he also holds associate appointments in the Department of Psychology, the Institute for Computing, Information and Cognitive Systems, and the School of Audiology and Speech Sciences. With research combining production, perception, control and biomechanics of speech, he has worked to bring the human body in all its complexity into discussions of language. Gick and his team have uncovered many basic mechanisms of the speech apparatus – even identifying and naming a previously unnamed functional body part. His hundreds of published papers on the biomechanics, control and tactile perception of speech have appeared in such wide-ranging journals as Nature, Neuroscience, Behavioral and Brain Science, and Computer Methods in Biomechanics and Biomedical Engineering. His work developing ultrasound imaging as a tool for speech research and intervention has brought ultrasound biofeedback to language learners and people with speech and hearing disorders, and his work in multimodal perception has shown how we “feel” speech information through our skin. Gick’s recent research develops an embodied approach to speech, with the goal of deepening links between biomechanics, linguistics, the nervous system, the digestive system and infant development to help elucidate the mechanisms and origins of the uniquely human capacity for speech.