The acoustics of a spoken message depends on the speaker, their
dialect, the rate of speech, background noise among other
things. Despite this variability, human listeners are able to
reliably perceive speech seemingly effortlessly especially
compared to contemporary speech recognition systems. How is this
possible?   In the Speech, Language and Cognition Lab we
investigate such questions related to Language use, in
particular, and Cognition, in general.  The Pattern Playback
machine used to synthesize speech (courtesy: Haskins
Laboratories)