Lisa Sanders

My research focuses on the role of selective auditory attention in  speech processing.  Speech is comprised of an overwhelming amount of  pitch and loudness information that changes rapidly in time.   Selective attention may play the role of allowing listeners to  preferentially process the information in speech that is most  important for understanding the actual message.  However, little is  known about what information listeners can and do attend to, how  infants learn to attend to the most useful information in native  language speech, differences in the ideal focus of selective  attention for processing different languages, and how second language  learners attend differently when processing a first and second  language.  My lab employs event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to  study rapid, online speech processing in adults and children as well  as fMRI to identify spatially distinct neural systems important for  auditory processing.