Joe Toscano

About

Please note: I will be moving to Villanova University to start a faculty position in the Psychology Department this fall. Website is under construction in the meantime!

My name is Joe Toscano, and I'm a Beckman Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I'm originally from Rochester, NY and received my BS in Brain & Cognitive Sciences from the University of Rochester. I received my PhD in Cognition and Perception from the Dept. of Psychology at the University of Iowa where I worked with Prof. Bob McMurray.

My research focuses on speech perception and spoken word recognition and examines several questions about these processes: How do listeners map sounds onto words? How do they deal with variability across different contexts? How do they combine multiple acoustic cues? How do they learn to do all of this?

To answer these questions, I use several approaches to examine the time-course of speech processing as it unfolds: event-related brain potentials that give us measures of perceptual encoding and categorization, and eye-movements that tell us about lexical activation. These experiments support several computational models (recurrent neural networks and statistical models) that describe how speech is learned and processed.

Thanks for visiting! — Joe Toscano

 

Tweets by @joetosc

Research

Follow the links below to read more about my current research.

Papers

Toscano, J.C., Buxó-Lugo, A., & Watson, D.G. (forthcoming). Using game-based approaches to increase level of engagement in research and education. In S. Dikkers (Ed.), TeacherCraft: Using Minecraft for Teaching and Learning. Pittsburgh: ETC Press.

Toscano, J.C., Anderson, N.D., & McMurray, B. (2013). Reconsidering the role of temporal order in spoken word recognition. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 20. 981-987.

Toscano, J.C., & McMurray, B. (2012). Cue-integration and context effects in speech: Evidence against speaking-rate normalization. Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, 74, 1284-1301.   [PubMed Central]

Toscano, J.C. (2011). Perceiving speech in context: Compensation for contextual variability at the level of acoustic cue encoding and categorization. Doctoral dissertation, University of Iowa.

Toscano, J.C., McMurray, B., Dennhardt, J., & Luck, S.J. (2010). Continuous perception and graded categorization: Electrophysiological evidence for a linear relationship between the acoustic signal and perceptual encoding of speech. Psychological Science, 21, 1532-1540.   [PubMed Central]

Toscano, J.C., & McMurray, B. (2010). Cue integration with categories: Weighting acoustic cues in speech using unsupervised learning and distributional statistics. Cognitive Science, 34, 434-464.   [PubMed Central]

Toscano, J.C., Mueller, K.L, McMurray, B., & Tomblin, J.B. (2010). Simulating individual differences in language ability and genetic differences in FOXP2 using a neural network model of the SRT task. In S. Ohlsson & R. Catrambone, Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2230-2235). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

McMurray, B., Aslin, R.N., & Toscano, J.C. (2009). Statistical learning of phonetic categories: Insights from a computational approach. Developmental Science, 12, 369-378.   [PubMed Central]

McMurray, B., Horst, J., Toscano, J.C., & Samuelson, L.K. (2009). Towards an integration of connectionist learning and dynamical systems processing: Case studies in speech and lexical development. In J.P. Spencer, M. Thomas, & J. McClelland (Eds.), Toward a Unified Theory of Development: Connectionism and Dynamic Systems Theory Re-Considered. New York: Oxford University Press.

Toscano, J.C. & McMurray, B. (2008). Using the distributional statistics of speech sounds for weighting and integrating acoustic cues. In B.C. Love, K. McRae, & V.M. Sloutsky (Eds.), Proceedings of the 30th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 433-438). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

Toscano, J.C., Perry, L.K., Mueller, K.L., Bean, A.F., Galle, M.E., & Samuelson, L.K. (2008). Language as shaped by the brain; the brain as shaped by development. Commentary on Christiansen & Chater, “Language as shaped by the brain”, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 31, 535-536.   [Local copy]

Toscano, J.C. (2005). Effect of object salience on eye movements in a visual-linguistic task. Honors thesis in Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester.

Toscano, J.C., & Beutter, B.R. (2005). Performance during visual search: Designing spacecraft with humans in mind. University of Rochester Journal of Undergraduate Research, 3, 8-12.

Toscano, J.C. (2004). Effect of salience on saccadic performance during visual search. Technical report for NASA Undergraduate Student Research Program.

Calendar

Links

• Praat Script Archives
• Chambana Science Café

Research groups

• Beckman Institute research areas:
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Cognitive Science
• Delta Center

Scientific societies

• Acoustical Society of America
• Cognitive Science Society
• Psychonomic Society
• Society for the Neurobiology of Language

Colleagues' websites

• Prof. Jont Allen, UIUC
• Prof. Richard Aslin, University of Rochester
• Prof. Meghan Clayards, McGill University
• Prof. Jennifer Cole, UIUC
• Dr. Marcus Galle, University of Iowa
• Prof. Susan Garnsey, UIUC
• Prof. Jessica Horst, Universtity of Sussex
• Prof. Steve Luck, University of California, Davis
• Prof. Bob McMurray, University of Iowa
• Dr. Cheyenne Munson, UIUC
• Dr. Lynn Perry, University of Iowa
• Prof. Gwyneth Rost, University of Massachusetts Amherst
• Prof. Duane Watson, UIUC