When we listen to someone speak, our brain has to figure out what they mean. A big part of this process is recognizing individual words. To do that, listeners don’t rely only on the basic sounds of speech, but also on prosody—features such as pitch, length, and loudness that shape how a word is spoken.

These acoustic cues do not always arrive at the same time. Sometimes they come slightly out of sync, and even when they arrive together, they often overlap. As a result, the brain must quickly combine this information and briefly hold it in memory. Remarkably, listeners can integrate these cues within milliseconds in order to decide which word they are hearing.

Researchers have proposed two main models to explain how this happens. One model suggests that the brain temporarily stores all the cues and waits until enough information is available before making a decision. The other model proposes that the brain begins forming a decision as soon as the first cue arrives and continuously updates it as new cues come in.

Although research methods have improved our ability to study how the brain processes sound over time, they still do not directly capture the real-time decisions the brain makes while recognizing speech. This project takes an important step toward addressing that gap by introducing and validating new cognitive and brain-based methods to track how prosodic cues are processed as speech unfolds.

This work matters because research on language development, clinical language and hearing disorders, and difficult listening environments shows that people differ in how they integrate auditory information. To understand these differences, we need a more precise picture of the timing of speech processing.

The goal of this Seal of Excellence project is to better understand how listeners combine and interpret the acoustic features of lexical prosody. Because timing is central to this question, the project uses two experiments involving eye-tracking and electroencephalography (EEG) to examine how these processes unfold in real time.

Duration: 15.01.2026 - 14.01.2028

Funding: ÖAW, Seal of Excellence Program

PI: Dušan Nikolić