Doctor Anna Fiveash

Dr Anna Fiveash is currently an ARC DECRA fellow at the MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, where she researches connections in the brain between music and language. Previously, she held two postdoctoral positions in the Auditory Cognition and Psychoacoustics team in the Lyon Neuroscience Research Centre of the National Centre for Scientific Research in France. In these positions, she collaborated with Professor Barbara Tillmann and Associate Professor Reyna Gordon to investigate rhythm processing in music and language in adults and children with and without developmental language disorders. She completed her PhD at Macquarie University in Sydney under the supervision of Professor Bill Thompson and Professor Genevieve McArthur, where she investigated syntactic processing in music and language, focusing specifically on interference paradigms. She completed her Master’s in Music, Mind, and Technology at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland, and her Bachelor of Psychology (Honours) at the Australian National University. Anna is interested in syntax, rhythm, and prediction of music and language, with implications for more general cognitive processing, developmental language disorders, and applications to education and speech pathology.