Beverly Wright, is Professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders. Wright and her students explore the general principles of auditory learning, a process that leads to improvements in perceptual skills. The lab seeks to identify the circumstances that are necessary for learning to occur as well as those that disrupt learning. These principles are examined using stimuli ranging from simple sounds to speech, and tasks ranging from fine-grained discrimination to categorization and intelligibility. For example, the lab has demonstrated that exposure to an acoustic stimulus can facilitate learning on a perceptual task, but only when that exposure occurs within ~30 minutes of practice on that task. Although the lab’s research program focuses on normal adults, it also pursues how learning changes with age, sensory experience (hearing loss), and cognitive background (e.g., language and reading disorders). Research on perceptual learning may lead to more effective training strategies for enhancing normal perceptual capacities and treating perceptual disorders.