Adrian Garcia-Sierra, PhD

Assistant Professor, Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences (Affiliate)

Research Overview

I investigate the neural patterns associated with learning the speech sounds of the native language(s). Specifically, I explore the sensory and cognitive mechanisms associated with language learning by means of electrophysiological procedures. I have shown that specific neural patterns in speech perception predicts infants’ later language abilities in English monolingual infants and Spanish monolingual infants. My findings suggest that the neural patterns associated with native and non-native speech perception have predictive value for later language abilities based on the underlying neural mechanism associated language commitment. My research in bilingual adults explores, the perceptual and cognitive flexibility in speech sound encoding. My research contributes in better understanding the role of high order-linguistic information in speech perception.

Education

Universidad de las Américas (University of the Americas), Puebla, México B.A. 05/1998 Psychology

The University of Texas at Austin Ph.D. 5/2007 Comm. Sciences and Disorders

Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington Post-Doc 8/2011 Language development and bilingualism

Recent Publications