My Research
I'm a graduate student and National Institutes of Health Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (NRSA) Fellow in the Language and Brain (LAB) Laboratory (P.I., Emily Myers) at the University of Connecticut in the Department of Psychological Sciences at the University of Connecticut.
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Humans possess the remarkable ability to transform minute changes in acoustic energy and air pressure into something comprehensible. My primary interest lays in the representation and implementation of these fine-grained acoustic cues we can measure in the speech signal, and their corresponding neurobiology.
More specifically, I am interested in how listeners aggregate each individual experience with a speech sound to form robust speech categories. In addition, I am also interested in how changes in context (e.g., changes in talker identity, speaking rate) can cause listeners to adjust their use of these cues, and the neural mechanisms that support such adaptation.
Curriculum Vitae
About Me
I am from Smithfield, RI and completed my B.A. in Psychology at Providence College in 2013.
I then began working on my M.S. at Villanova University in 2014, where I joined the Word Recognition and Auditory Perception (WRAP) Lab. In late 2016 I completed my master's thesis, entitled The role of the speech envelope in speaking rate compensation, which examined the relationship between oscillatory neuroelectric activity, the amplitude envelope of speech, and speaking rate compensation.
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After completing a summer research fellowship at Villanova University in 2016, I moved to the University of Connecticut where I became the lab manager of the Language and Brain (LAB) Lab under the direction of Dr. Emily Myers.
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Outside of the lab, I enjoy reading too much Wikipedia and having glorious long hair. I'm hoping one to day to gain admission to the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. In addition, I am a violinist, violist, and drummer.
Contact
Email: david.saltzman "at" uconn.edu GitHub: github.com/disaltzman OSF: https://osf.io/xrgh5/
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