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Lynne E. Bernstein, Ph.D., joined the House Ear Institute in 1995 as head of the Department of Communication Neuroscience. Throughout her research career, Dr. Bernstein has pursued questions about human speech perception. An ongoing research focus has been the perceptual abilities of congenitally deaf adults, including those who have obtained cochlear implants. This patient group affords the opportunity to investigate brain plasticity in response to new sensory-perceptual input introduced during adulthood. A second area of research concerns the neural basis for multisensory speech perception, which has led to electrophysiological and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain studies of audiovisual, auditory-only, visual-only, and vibrotactile speech processing. A third area of research, which has included studies of speech signals, is focused on developing computer software systems that synthesize artificial talking agents.
In addition to her ongoing research at the Institute, Dr. Bernstein was program director for the Cognitive Neuroscience Program and one of several program directors for the Science of Learning Centers Program of the National Science Foundation (NSF) from 2003 to 2005. As director for the Cognitive Neuroscience Program, she was responsible for the evaluation and recommendation for funding of individual researcher proposals to the NSF. As a director for the Science of Learning Centers Program, she was the cognizant program officer for one of the funded Centers.
Before joining the House Ear Institute, Dr. Bernstein conducted research at Gallaudet University Research Institute, where she studied speech perception in deaf adults. Prior to that, she was a research scientist and co-director of a laboratory working on technical devices to aid speech perception in deaf adults and children, as well as fundamental studies of speech perception in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. Previously, Dr. Bernstein was a research associate at the Kennedy-Krieger Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, where she conducted studies of speech perception, particularly, in children with specific language disorders.
Dr. Bernstein has received research funding from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, one of the institutes of the National Institutes of Health (NIDCD-NIH), and the National Science Foundation (NSF). Additionally, Dr. Bernstein received a five-year Research Career Development Award from the NIH. She is an adjunct professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a fellow of the Acoustical Society of America. She has authored and co-authored articles for numerous publications including NeuroReport, Perception & Psychophysics, the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, and Memory & Cognition. She recently contributed chapters to the Handbook of Speech Perception, the Handbook of Multisensory Processes, and the Oxford Handbook of Deaf Studies, Language, and Education.
Dr. Bernstein earned her doctorate in psycholinguistics and master’s degree in linguistics from the University of Michigan. She received additional training as a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University, where she researched speech perception. In the 1980s, she studied mathematics at the University of Maryland and the Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.
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