Chang Lab
Principal Investigator: Edward Chang
Institution: University of California, San Francisco (San Francisco, CA)
Primary Subfield: Neuroscience
Recruitment Status: ✅ Accepting PhD Students ✅ Hiring Postdocs
Research Focus
PROJECT SUMMARY The basic mechanisms underlying comprehension of spoken language are still largely unknown. Over the past decade, we have gained new insights to how the human brain extracts the most fundamental linguistic elements (consonants and vowels) from a complex and highly variable acoustic signal. However, the next set of questions await pertaining to the sequencing of those auditory elements and how they are integrated with other features, such as, the amplitude envelope of speech. Further investigation of the cortical representation of speech sounds can likely shed light on these fundamental questions. Previous research has implicated the superior temporal cortex in the processing of speech sounds, but little is known about how these sounds are linked together into the perceptual experience of words and continuous speech. The recording of neural activity directly from the cortical surface is a promising approach to study this since it can provide both high spatial and temporal resolution. This proposal seeks to examine the mechanisms of phonetic encoding by utilizing neurophysiological recordings obtained during neurosurgical procedures. High-density electrode arrays and…
Active NIH Awards
- 5R01DC012379-15: Functional organization of the superior temporal gyrus for speech perception (2026)
- 5R01MH122431-05: Spatiotemporal dynamics of the human emotion network (2025)
- 5R01DC012379-14: Functional organization of the superior temporal gyrus for speech perception (2025)
- 5U01DC018671-05: A Pilot Clinical Trial for Speech Neuroprosthesis (2025)
- 5U01NS117765-05: The neural coding of speech across human languages (2024)
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