Federal Project Grant Award Summary

The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) awarded Stanford University a $124,686 Project Grant on March 5, 2026, under the Research Related to Deafness and Communication Disorders program (CFDA 93.173) to support a two-year research initiative through February 28, 2028. The award funds a mentored research project investigating the neurobiological mechanisms by which prosody—the intonation and rhythm patterns of speech—enables listeners to anticipate informativity in linguistic messages. The research leverages intracranial electroencephalography (IEEG) data from neurosurgical patients and machine learning analysis to measure how subcortical structures, particularly the hippocampus, contribute to linguistic processing and memory encoding during naturalistic speech comprehension.

The project delivers scholarly research outputs across three primary aims: determining whether prosodic tracking enhances encoding of phonetic, semantic, and syntactic features throughout the temporal lobe; investigating whether prosodic tracking modulates hippocampal theta oscillations to support memory encoding; and dissociating how the brain uses prosodic cues to prepare for information load versus how it predicts actual message content. These research activities advance neurolinguistic models by documenting the understudied role of prosody as a cue to expected informativity and contribute to ongoing scientific debates regarding hippocampal involvement in language processing.