Welcome to the home page of Dr. Mitchell Sommers, Director of the Speech and Hearing Laboratory at Washington University in St. Louis. As Director of the lab, I use a multi-faceted approach to understand basic mechanisms mediating spoken word recognition in young adults and to examine how those mechanisms change in healthy older adults and individuals with Alzheimer's disease. The underlying framework of all our work is that understanding spoken language requires integration of auditory and cognitive abilities. Therefore, most of the studies we conduct are directed at gaining a better understanding of this interaction.

We have an integrated research team of undergraduate research
assistants, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows working on a variety of projects, including: studies investigating how people can use lipreading and other visual cues to improve their understanding of spoken language, how our ability to comprehend spoken discourse changes as a function of age, and how we might be able to use voice information to detect when people are lying. Please see the links to individual research areas for more details on these and other projects in the lab.