David W. Gow, PhD

  • Lab Phone: 617-726-6143

Research Investigator Profile

Biography

  • NIH Profile

Affiliations

David W. Gow, PhD

David W. Gow, PhD

  • Clinical Instructor in Neurology,
    Harvard Medical School
  • Assistant in Psychology,
    Massachusetts General Hospital
  • Professor of Psychology,
    Salem State College
  • Adjunct, Harvard-MIT Program in Speech
    and Hearing Bioscience and Technology

Research Description

Our work examines the processing interactions between different levels of representation (mostly phonetic and lexical) during the perception of spoken language.  The approach is strongly interdisciplinary, embracing theory and experimental paradigms ranging from acoustic-phonetic analysis to formal linguistics, psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience.  Our current work relies on the use of Granger causality analysis of high spatiotemporal resolution MRI constrained movies of cortical activation to observe patterns of directional functional interaction between localized brain regions during spoken language perception.  Drawing on a broad experimental localization literature, we can use these analyses to develop highly articulated, empirically grounded models of cognitive processing architecture. Our work suggests that speech perception is a highly interactive process involving bidirectional connections to between brain regions associated with phonetic processing and higher regions associated with representations of articulation, phonological wordform, semantics and working memory.

Research interests

Spoken language processing
Research techniques

MRI, MEG, EEG, iEEG. Granger causality analysis, online psycholinguistic behavioral methods, acoustic phonetic analysis, linguistic analysis, mousetracking, eyetracking
Diseases studied Stroke/aphasia
Selected publications
  1. Gow, D.W., Keller, C.J., Eskandar, E., Meng, N.,& Cash, S.S. (2009). Parallel versus serial processing dependencies in the perisylvian speech network: A Granger analysis of intracranial EEG data.  Brain and Language, 110, 43-48.
  2. Gow, D.W. & Segawa, A. (2009).  Articulatory mediation of speech perception: A causal analysis of multi-modal imaging data. Cognition, 110, 222-236.
  3. Gow, D.W., Segawa, J.A., Alfhors, S., & Lin, F-H. (2008). Lexical influences on speech perception: A Granger causality  analysis of MEG and EEG source estimates. NeuroImage, 43,614-623.
  4. Gow, D.W., & Im, A. (2004). A cross-linguistic examination of assimilation context effects. Journal of Memory and Language, 51, 279-296.
  5. Gow, D.W. (2003). Feature parsing: Feature cue mapping in spoken word recognition. Perception and Psychophysics, 65, 575-590.
NCBI PubMed link NCBI PubMed Publications
Collaborators David Caplan, MD,PhD, Seppo Ahlfors, PhD, Nikos Makris, MD, PhD, Sydney Cash, MD, Bob McMurray, PhD, Mark Tramo, MD, PhD
E-mail address

gow@helix.mgh.harvard.edu

Lab mailing address CPZ-S340
175 Cambridge Street
Boston, MA 02114
Lab website

Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging

The Harvard-MIT Program in Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology (SHBT)

  • © 2013 Massachusetts General Hospital
  • 617-726-2000
  • TDD: 617-724-8800

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