NSF awards grant to Van Engen

Kristin Van Engen, PhD, assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences and of linguistics, both in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has received a $433,242 National Science Foundation grant to support research into why some speakers are more difficult to understand than others and how listeners adjust to unfamiliar accents. Unlike […]

Which mask is easier on the ears?

To assess how different styles of face masks affected speech intelligibility in normal hearing listeners, researchers from Washington University in St. Louis put some of the most popular mask designs to the test. Their research was published in the journal Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications. The team, from the labs of Kristin Van Engen, PhD, assistant professor […]

Understanding accented speech: AKA, understanding speech

Kristin Van Engen studies the dynamic back-and-forth between communicators, including the impact that noise and accent have on intelligibility and comprehension. Communication among people with different accents is particularly challenging because of the way that our brains expect to hear sounds. People don’t always hear the comfortable sounds they have learned to expect, leading some […]