By 2050, around 2.5 billion people worldwide are expected to be impacted by hearing loss. This projection is mainly driven by the expected population growth and ageing. Hearing loss can result in difficulty following conversations and social isolation. In this blog, we explore what’s really important in understanding spoken language, and speculate on sound solutions of the future!

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Last year Cas Coopmans defended his thesis ‘Triangles in the brain: The role of hierarchical structure in language use’. Luckily he was happy to answer some questions about it.

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In spoken language, it’s not only the words we say that matter, but also how we say them. When we speak, we constantly produce small changes in the tone of our voice, how loudly we speak, or when we decide to pause for a bit (the technical term for these aspects of speech is prosody). How we speak can convey how we feel about something, but it can also affect the meaning of our words. As we will see next, the same sentence can have different meanings, just by changing how we say it.

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Dr. Marlou Rasenberg defended her thesis entitled ‘Mutual understanding from a multimodal and interactional perspective’. Luckily she was happy to answer some questions about it.

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Getting from an idea to the ultimate goal of intellectual gold (knowledge) can be long and winding for each researcher. Nevertheless, this process involves the same four steps, regardless of the question: 1) digging into the papers, 2) then into theories, 3) back into papers, and 4) ultimately running experiments. In steps one to three, scientists can take a personalized approach, choosing which papers and theories to use to develop new studies. In step four, however, scientists try to use the same (or very similar) tools as all other scientists so they can compare and confirm the intellectual gold (knowledge), allowing them to continue updating and developing theories.

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