The Hamilton Lab is part of the NeuroComm Labs at UT Austin’s Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences in the Moody College of Communication. We are also jointly affiliated with the Department of Neurology at UT Austin’s Dell Medical School. Our research aims to determine how natural sounds including speech are represented by the human brain during speech perception and production, and how these representations change during development. We study how the human brain processes speech sounds using intracranial electrocorticography (ECoG) recordings from patients with intractable epilepsy who are undergoing surgery to treat their epilepsy. We also study how the brain can track speech in clean and noisy environments during perception and production using noninvasive EEG and behavioral studies in healthy participants. We use a combination of electrophysiology, behavior, neuroimaging, and computational modeling to address these questions.
We would not be able to do this work without the generous help of clinicians and our patient volunteers, who participate in listening tasks during their hospital stay. You can read more about our research on the Research page.
Funding Sources:
We are grateful for funding from the following organizations:
- The National Institutes of Health - National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders
- The Department of Defense Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs (CDMRP)
- Coleman Fung Foundation
- The Texas Speech Language Hearing Foundation