Matthew Winn
University of Maryland
Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences
Au.D., Ph.D.
Audiology and hearing science
Download recent poster presentations here: (right click, save as...)
- Perception of consonant voicing: altered use of acoustic cues for voicing contrasts in spectrally-degraded signals, signals in noise, low-pass filtered signals, and signals heard by cochlear implant listeners.
- The perception of fricatives 's' and 'sh,' and the adjustment of these perceptual categories in response to various contexts. Perception by normal-hearing listeners and cochlear implant listeners.
I recently completed my Ph.D. working with Monita Chatterjee in the cochlear implants and psychophysics lab at the University of Maryland in College Park, MD. After having completed my doctoral degree in audiology, I went back to the research lab to explore how people hear speech sounds if they have hearing impairment or if they are in background noise.
Research Interests
[ Speech perception ]
How can we overcome difficult listening conditions to hear speech sounds?
Speech is a dynamic complex sound consisting of a variety of acoustic 'cues' that correspond to individual sounds. The cues could be things like a sound's duration, spectral structure, time-varying amplitude information, spectral tilt, etc. As these acoustic properties signal the presence of one sound instead of another, we must decide which ones are important, and give them perceptual prominence. Sometimes timing cues are more important, and other times the spectral cues are more important.
My research explores the possibility that the perceptual prominence of these cues can be adjusted by listeners who face various challenges in speech perception.
Listeners face various types of challenges that can make speech perception difficult. Some of these include hearing impairment, the use of a cochlear implant, the presence of background noise, reverberation, a heavy accent on the talker's voice, or merely the presence of multiple people in the same conversation.
When these situations compromise important sound components, do listeners switch their attention to other components that remain intact?
Some recent data from our lab suggest that they can do this.
Important Questions that drive this work:
We know a lot about how acoustic/phonetic cues are used by people with normal hearing, in quiet, optimal conditions. Do listeners with hearing impairment use different cues when perceiving speech?
When a clinical tests reveal good performance on word recognition, how can we explain the patient's reported difficulties?
How do young language-learners learn to prioritize the multiple acoustic components of speech sounds?
How can we measure fine-grained spectral resolution in a way that is relevant for speech perception?
What are the neural correlates of phonetic cue-weighting?
What are the roles of various acoustic cues that help a listener normalize to the speech different talkers?
Papers / Presentations / sample audio files
... coming soon!
People I work with:
Monita Chatterjee
William Idsardi
Rochelle Newman
Sandra Gordon-Salant
Shu-Chen Peng
Nelson Lu
Ariane Rhone
Other friends/collaborators at UMD: Cherish Oberzut, Shannon Barrios, Julian Jenkins, Nai Ding, Mickael Deroche, Dan Hertz, Viral Tejani, Danielle Zion, Will Bologna, Jaci Shurman, Allison Blodgett
Future work:
Postdoctoral research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison