About Me

Hi, I am a postdoctoral researcher in cognitive neuroscience and speech perception at the University of Toronto Scarborough, working with Dr. Philip Monahan in the Computation and Psycholinguistics Laboratory (CAP Lab).

My research focuses on how the brain processes and represents speech sounds, using behavioral and EEG experiments, I study the encoding of speech sounds in typical and clinical populations, exploring questions like how phonological representations retain acoustic details and how factors such as typicality and perceptual context influence memory encoding.

Research

Universal and language-specific encoding of speech

Speech sounds are organized by shared articulatory and acoustic properties, but languages carve up the shared space in different ways. For example, the flap [ɾ] occurs in both English and Korean but patterns with different sounds: with [t] as allophones of /t/ in English, and with [l] as allophones of /ɾ/ in Korean. This project tests whether and how language-specific phonological patterns shape the neural encoding of language-universal phonetic features, a key step toward linking neurophysiology and linguistic theory.

Categorical encoding and phonetic cue weighting

Not all phonetic cues are created equal—at least not in the brain. For example, voicing contrasts in English stops are cued by both voice onset time (VOT) and fundamental frequency (F0), but listeners weigh these cues differently. How is individual cue-weighting reflected in neural encoding? By combining behavioral measures with EEG, we test whether primary and secondary phonetic cues differentially engage pre-attentive auditory processing—shedding light on how fine-grained acoustic detail interacts with abstract phonological representations.