Assistant Professor Alice Chan and a team of researchers from Northwestern University have been awarded a National Science Foundation grant of US$434,472 to explore musical and lexical tone deafness over 3 years, starting September 2011.  Professor KK Luke will serve as the consultant for this project. 

The project intends to expand our understanding about the organisation of speech and music processing in the nervous system.  The central question of this project is on what perceptual disorders in processing pitch reveal about speech and music.  The team hopes that this research could give us a better understanding of communicative consequences of tone deficits (or deafness) and would ultimately lead to clinical recognition and treatment.  The project will involve participants of different language backgrounds in Singapore and the U.S.A.