Joe Toscano

Background

About Joe Toscano

I am primarily interested in speech perception and language processing. My research focuses on how listeners map low-level acoustic cues in the speech signal onto linguistic representations, how these mappings are learned, and how they are affected by context. I am also interested in how hearing loss affects speech recognition and how we can develop speech-based tests for measuring hearing loss. My research group at Villanova, the Word Recognition and Auditory Perception Lab, uses a number of tools to study these processes, including computational approaches (unsupervised statistical learning models; neural networks), cognitive neuroscience techniques (electrophysiology/EEG; event-related brain potentials), and behavioral methods (psychophysical techniques; eye-tracking; acoustic analyses). Together, these approaches allow us to study speech processing as it unfolds over time, providing a window into how the brain transforms speech sounds into meaningful language, and providing us with information needed to build computational models that can learn to recognize speech similarly to human listeners. More info about my research can be found on my personal website (http://joetoscano.com) and my lab website (http://wraplab.co).