Chiung-Yu (Lisa) Chang, a PhD candidate in the Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience program, has been awarded a Taiwanese Overseas Pioneers (TOP) Grant for dissertation research. Funded by the National Science and Technology Council in Taiwan, TOP grants aim to support talented doctoral candidates and young scholars in the fields of humanities and social sciences who are currently studying or working overseas.
This grant will support Chang's dissertation research, entitled "Phonetic Cue Weighting: From Laboratories to the Wild." She will use behavioral experiments and scalp electroencephalography to study phonetic cue weighting, the relative impact of different acoustic cues on categorization of speech sounds. Specifically, this work will investigate how phonetic cue weighting shifts dynamically in background noise, under divided attention, and when listening to continuous speech.