معرفی
Joseph Toscano is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Villanova University. He is currently on leave, serving as a Rotating Program Director at the National Science Foundation (NSF) since 2024. His research bridges speech perception, language processing, and cognitive neuroscience, integrating computational models, neuroimaging, and behavioral studies.
Dr. Toscano teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science, including a lab course on speech perception for non-science majors. His lab, the Word Recognition & Auditory Perception (WRAP) Lab, focuses on topics like top-down effects on perception, hearing difficulty, computational models of speech development, and acoustic cue integration. The lab emphasizes inclusivity and student-driven research.
His recent publications analyze gradient activation of referents in speech, neural decoding of speech sounds, and impacts of face masks on speech recognition. Key research themes include maintaining sub-phonemic uncertainty over time, cross-modal perception, and adaptive speech processing.
Scientific awards include
- Best Student Paper in Speech Communication — First Prize (2006)
- Best Student Paper in Speech Communication — Second Prize (2008)
- Graduate Student Travel Award from the Psychonomic Society (2017)
- Graduate Student Travel Award from the Psychonomic Society (2015)
Dr. Toscano has supervised numerous M.S. students, including Harini Sankar (2024), Reet Patel (2024), and Grace Gervino (2023), with projects spanning computational models of speech perception to effects of bilingualism on vowel categorization. The WRAP Lab welcomes researchers across disciplines to explore perception and cognition.
