Recent research suggests that listeners use visual speech cues to recover degraded spectrotemporal signals in auditory speech, suggesting that visual speech may provide richer information about auditory speech signals than current models suppose. The proposed research uses a combination of intracranial electrocorticography (ECoG) and functional neuroimaging (fMRI) to test a novel neurobiological account of these crossmodal enhancements. Because speech-sensitive sites along the superior temporal gyrus (STG; i.e., auditory cortex) exhibit spatially-organized selectivity for spectrotemporal features, visual speech may improve auditory speech perception by enhancing the distributed encoding of these features in auditory cortex. This hypothesis will be tested by examining whether visual speech improves the ability to reconstruct auditory speech spectrograms from multi-electrode ECoG signals in auditory cortex (Aim 1). Auditory sentence stimuli will be filtered to selectively degrade spectral or temporal information, and the information provided by visual speech will be indexed by improvements in the ability to reconstruct the filtered (i.e., missing) information. Spectral and temporal restoration effects will be situated within the broader functional organization of the auditory system using fMRI-based representational similarity analysis (Aim 2). We hypothesize that crossmodal restoration effects observed under different filtering conditions (spectral vs. temporal) will reflect known differences in spectrotemporal tuning across cortical subfields, cortical regions, hemispheres, and anterior-posterior position along the STG. Finally, crossmodal effects on temporal, spectrotemporal, phonetic feature, and phoneme-level representations of noise-degraded speech will be characterized and compared to assess their respective contributions to crossmodal enhancements of speech coding (Aim 3). The fellowship will support the applicant’s development towards becoming a world-class independent researcher by providing training in the techniques best-suited to test neural hypotheses generated on the basis of his graduate research using psychophysics and digital signals processing. In addition to personalized training in these techniques, the sponsoring team and institution will provide access to a collaborative network for ECoG data collection, funds for neuroimaging, and multiple opportunities for ongoing training in the design and optimization of ECoG and neuroimaging experiments. This training will support the applicant’s long-term goals of using multiple state-of-the-art methods to understand the neural mechanisms of crossmodal facilitations, with the goal of informing the design of perceptual training regimes and prosthetic devices for the treatment of hearing deficits. By understanding the brain’s internal mechanisms for inter-areal sensory enhancement, the candidate aims to facilitate the design of biologically-inspired interventions to enhance sensory coding...