Elvira Pérez is currently working at the University of Nottingham as a Research Fellow at the National Biomedical Research Unit in Hearing. She obtained her degree in Psychology at the University of Granada in 2000. She carried out her MPhil research on syllabic units, stress and speech with Julio Santiago at the Dept. of Experimental Psychology and Physiology of Behaviour, in the same university. She concluded her PhD on duplex perception with Georg Meyer at the School of Psychology, University of Liverpool, UK. She spent 14 months at Kyushu University, Japan, as a postdoctoral fellow sponsored by JSPS (Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science) where she worked on auditory illusions Yoshitaka Nakajima.

Research Interests

• Language and non-language perception: How are we able to perceive language, music or noise? Are our auditory strategies affected by our auditory experience or by the acoustic characteristics of the signal? How are we able to ignore background noise in everyday life? Which are the underlying neural mechanisms involved in sound organization?
• Temporal connexion between languaje and non-language perception and production: Are there temporal paterns common in language production and perception? Can the syllable explain the temporal commonalities found in language/non-language production and percepion? Is it possible to crate an ‘Auditory Grammar’ to explain the perceptual regularities exhibited by the auditory system?
• Auditory training: How can we improve the auditory perception of people with cochlear implants and other amplifying devices? Can we train and improve auditory attention? Which other cognitive processes can we train? Why are there people with hearing loss who adapt successfully to the hearing aid and others who do not? Are there personality traits that could predict this adaptability?
  

Publications

Pérez, E. (2009). La sílaba: Unidad temporal común en percepción y producción de habla. Ciencia Cognitiva: Revista Electrónica de Divulgación, 3:1, 18-20.

Perea, M. & Pérez, E. (2009). Beyond alphabetic orthographies: The role of form and phonology in transposition effects in Katakana. Language and Cognitive Processes, 24, 67-88.

Remijn, G., Pérez, E., Nakajima, Y., & Ito H. (2008). Frequency modulation facilitates (modal) auditory restoration of a gap. Hearing Research, 243, 113-120.

Pérez, E., Georg, M., & Harrison, N. (2008). Neural correlates of attending speech and non-speech: ERPs associated with duplex perception. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 21, 452-471.

Georg, M., Wuerger, S., & Pérez, E. (2008). Some aspects of speech and the brain. Pre-lexical Speech Processing in the brain. In Fuchs, S. & Perrier, P. (Eds.). Peter Lang publishing group.

Santiago, J., Lupianez, J., Pérez, E., & Funes, M. J. (2007). Time (also) flies from left to right. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 14, 512-516.

Pérez, E., Santiago, J., Palma, A., & O'Seaghdha, P. (2007). Perceptual bias in speech error data collection: Insights from Spanish speech errors. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 36, 207-235.

Santiago, J., Pérez, E., Palma, A., & Stemberger, J. (2007). Syllable, word, and phoneme frequency effects in Spanish phonological speech errors: The David effect on the source of the error. In: Carson, T. S. & Ferreira, V. (Eds.) The State of the Art in Speech Error Research: Proceedings of the LSA Institute Workshop. Cambridge, MA. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, 53, 265-303.

Pérez. E. & Nakajima, Y. (2007). When time perception goes wrong. In Mori, S., Miyaoka, T., Wong, W. (Eds.). Fechner Day 2007. Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Meeting of the International Society for Psychophysics Tokyo, Japan: The International Society for Psychophysics (pp. 159-164).

Pérez. E. & Nakajima, Y. (2007). Ungrammatical patterns should be resolved. In Tochihara, Y. (Ed.). Proceedings of the 2nd International Symposium on Design of Artificial Environments Fukuoka, Japan: Kyushu University, The 21st Century COE program (pp. 130-135).

Remijn, G., Ito, H., Pérez, E., & Nakajima, Y. (2007).Sound edges as independent perceptual units. In Tochihara, Y. (Ed.). Proceedings of the 2nd International Symposium on Design of Artificial Environments Fukuoka, Japan: Kyushu University, The 21st Century COE program (pp. 128-129).

Pérez, E. & Rodriguez-Esteban, R. (2006). Oreja... a MATLAB environment for the design of psychoacoustic stimuli. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments & Computers, 38, 574-578.