ProfessorMegan McAuliffe

Professor McAuliffe is a speech pathologist/scientist with specialty in speech production and perception in healthy ageing and neurological disease, particularly Parkinson’s disease. She co-directs the Speech-Language Neuroscience Lab | Te Puna Pūtaiao Ioio (https://www.canterbury.ac.nz/science/schools/psyc-speech-hear/research/uc-speech-lab/), with her colleague Dr Catherine Theys.

Professor McAuliffe's research career began in the field of motor speech disorders, specifically in speech production in degenerative disease and brain injury (termed dysarthria). More recently, she has applied this knowledge to speech perception and production in ageing, asking how listeners can understand signals that are distorted. The continuum of speech signal change from ageing speech, accented speech, and that associated with neurological disease is of particular interest.