News

New preprint by PhD student Chandra Haider using MEG for speech reconstruction to show which acoustic / linguistic are affected by a speaker wearing a face mask: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.09.28.461909Funded by the special SARS-COV-2 program of the FWF!

New preprint by our PhD student Nina Suess and colleagues, where they show that during lip reading, the visual cortex not only tracks the unheard speech envelope, but also the unheard modulations of resonant frequencies (formants) and pitch linked to the lip movements: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.04.13.439628

New preprint by our PhD student Fabian Schmidt and colleagues, where they show that as speech becomes less intelligible (manipulated via vocoding), tracking shifts from the syllabic (linguistic) to the modulation (acoustic) rate of speech: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.03.25.437033

Out now in BMC Biology! Work by our PhD student Moritz Köhler, Gianpaolo Demarchi and Nathan Weisz: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12915-021-00992-8

New preprint by Nina Suess and colleagues: https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/rcfxv They investigate how linguistic characteristics of language and hearing impairment have an impact on lip reading abilities and provide a new tool to asses lip reading abilities for German speakers, the so called Salzburg Lip Reading Test (SaLT)!

New preprint by Quirin Gehmacher & Patrick Reisinger (shared first authorship, together with Thomas Hartmann, Thomas Keintzel, Sebastian Rösch, Konrad Schwarz from MED-EL & Nathan Weisz) where they show that human hearing nerve activity is modulated by selective attention: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.01.433316v1

Out now in Cortex: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010945221000320 Work led by our PhD student Nina Suess, Thomas Hartmann & Nathan Weisz showing a differential effect of attentional focus on entrained oscillations (or phase adjustment) in primary sensory areas and frontoparietal areas!

Out now in Frontiers in Psychology: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.585437 Work by Thomas Hartmann and Nathan Weisz. The Objective Psychophysics Toolbox (o_ptb) provides an intuitive, unified, and clear interface, built on top of the PTB that enables researchers to write readable, clean, and concise code.

Out now in Journal of Neuroscience: https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0231-20.2020Work by our independent postdoc Andreas Wutz, Agnese Zazio & Nathan Weisz where they reveal neural correlates underlying the dynamic processing of multiple-object scenarios

Senior scientist Anne Hauswald and colleagues published a paper in European Journal of Neuroscience: https://doi.org/10.1111/ejn.14912Their findings underline that speech tracking and alpha power are modified differently by the degree of degradation of continuous speech but together contribute to subjective speech understanding.