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Beverly Wright is a Professor at Northwestern University in the Department of Communication. Her students explore general principles of auditory learning, which lead to dramatic improvements in perceptual skills. Her lab seeks to identify the circumstances necessary for learning to occur and what disrupts learning. The principles are examined using stimuli ranging from simple sounds to speech, and tasks focusing on fine-grained discrimination and categorization intelligibility. For example, her lab has demonstrated that exposure to an acoustic stimulus can facilitate learning of a perceptual task if the exposure occurs approximately 30 minutes before practicing the task. The research program primarily focuses on normal adults while pursuing learning changes related to age, sensory experience, such as hearing loss, and cognitive background, including language and reading disorders. A proposed study aims to investigate the impact of a learning paradigm on individuals with reading disorders who perform poorly on auditory perceptual tasks, which may cause delays in perceptual development from childhood to adolescence. Thus, her research on perceptual learning aims at developing effective training strategies for perceptual disorders and employs objective, clinical measures to guide diagnosis and treatment for cognitive disorders.
Standard PhD requirements for TGS departments including Chemistry, Physics, and Sociology.