Chad Rogers

Research interests

Much of my prior work has been focused on speech comprehension in young and older adults. My approach represents a combination of cognitive psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, and audiology. My specific research topics of late are: (1) The neural reorganization of speech processing. I am interested in how young and older adults may engage different routes to successful speech processing by recruiting different neural mechanisms revealed through EEG, structural and functional MRI. (2) Effortful listening and its impact on semantic processing. In difficult listening situations people report expending cognitive effort to achieve successful speech comprehension. I am interested in how people use meaning and semantics as a “shortcut” to reduce effort. (3). Linguistic and acoustic contributions to auditory memory. I am also interested in how variables like syntax and background noise make information not only difficult to understand, but also less likely to be remembered.