I am incredibly honoured to have received the Alan Berkeley Milne Prize for the best undergraduate psychology thesis in the 2025-2026 academic year!
My thesis, titled “From Noise to Meaning”, explored how autistic adults understand vocoded (degraded) speech. Specifically, it examined whether prior knowledge of (previously encountered) sentence content and/or familiarity with the speaker’s voice helps listeners make sense of unclear speech. We found that participants with higher autistic traits used prior sentence content only when listening to a familiar speaker, but did not appear to use this information when the speaker changed. In other words, autistic traits appeared to affect how flexibly people used prior speech information to understand degraded speech.
This project has been an incredibly rewarding experience, and I am deeply appreciative of those who helped shape it. I would like to thank my supervisors: Dr Agnieszka Konopka, Dr Anastasia Klimovich-Gray as well as PhD student Pepita Alex, for their unwavering support, patience and expert guidance throughout this project. I would also like to thank my close friends and family for their constant encouragement, which helped me stay motivated throughout the challenges of this academic year.
My time at the University of Aberdeen has given me a fantastic opportunity to gain both theoretical knowledge and practical skills, which I am confident will help me succeed in my future career.
The School would like to congratulate Marta on her graduation and wish them the very best in the future!
