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I work at the Fraunhofer Institute of Digital Media Technology, as a Horizon2020 Early Stage Researcher, with supervision from Axel Winneke and Jan Rennies-Hochmuth. I also work in collaboration with the Medical Physics and Neuropsychology departments at Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, with Volker Hohmann, Birger Kollmeier, and Stefan Debener. In addition, I have spent time at the Centre for Speech Technology Research (CSTR) at the University of Edinburgh, where I learnt about the use of pupillometry in listening effort research.
My research title is ‘Assessing and reducing cognitive load of listening to speech in adverse conditions’. The aim of this project is to gain further insight into the neural underpinnings of listening effort, by using electroencephalography (EEG), and how they are affected by intelligibility improvement algorithms. In other words, I am interested in learning more about the extra work the brain has to do to understand speech when there is a lot of noise in the environment.
So far, I have run two experiments. The first experiment investigated the relationship between subjective listening effort and cortical alpha power, comparing the response for unprocessed speech and speech processed by the AdaptDRC algorithm. The second experiment extended this to include pupil dilation as a measure of effortful listening. Conference proceedings of the preliminary results can already be found on the publications page and full papers reporting the results of both experiments are expected to be published later this year.
The ENRICH ETN network has enabled me to access many training opportunities, take part in several workshops, and attend high profile conferences at which I have presented my work. I was also session organiser for the ENRICH/UKAN Careers in industry and academia workshop at the 23rd International Congress on Acoustics, Aachen in September 2019.
I first discovered my interest in studying how the brain processes speech while studying experimental psychology at the University of Bristol, where I completed my undergraduate thesis on the topic “Features, Phonemes and Syllables: the Units of Speech Perception” with Nina Kazanina. After working in military mental health research at King’s College London, I returned to my research interests and enrolled at University College London to do a master’s in Language Sciences with specialisation in Neuroscience and Communication. There I ran a research project with Patti Adank, looking at how the imitation and receiving feedback while listening to a novel accent can improve the perception of said accent, as well as how cognitive abilities are associated with novel accent speech processing.