RESEARCH PROJECTS
Current projects I am involved with are below. For more information about our work in the Audibility, Perception, and Cognition lab, click here or follow us on Facebook and Instagram.
FINDING APPROPRIATE SOLUTIONS TO TREAT REDUCED AUDIBILITY IN KIDS (FASTRAK)
With the FASTRAK study, we aim to develop more accurate ways to test children’s hearing and develop clinical speech recognition tools that can help audiologists determine when children may benefit from being fit with amplification. These tools will be very useful for clinical audiologists who evaluate and treat children with mild hearing levels. We will be partnering with clinical sites at Boston Children’s Hospital, Arkansas Children’s Hospital, University of Iowa, and Washington University-St. Louis. This project is funded by the NIH-NIDCD.
COMPLEX LISTENING SKILLS IN SCHOOL-AGE CHILDREN WHO ARE HARD OF HEARING
In the first Complex Listening studies, we examined how auditory experience (hearing aid use and unaided/aided speech audibility) impacted children's speech recognition outcomes. In our second round of funding, we are now exploring how children's supra-threshold hearing abilities, as well as linguistic and cognitive skills, impact their ability to listen and understand. Click here for more detail about the first 5 years of the Complex Listening study. This project is funded by the NIH-NIDCD.
LONGITUDINAL OUTCOMES OF LITERACY IN ADOLESCENTS WHO ARE HARD OF HEARING (LOLAH)
In collaboration with the Pediatric Audiology Lab at the University of Iowa, we are continuing to see children from the OCHL studies who are now adolescents in middle school and high school. Our goal for this study is to see if we can predict reading ability in middle and high school from our OCHL kindergarten data. This project is led by Elizabeth Walker, PhD, at the University of Iowa, and is funded by the NIH-NIDCD.
CHILDREN'S ENGLISH-SPANISH SPEECH RECOGNITION (CHEGSS)
In collaboration with the Human Auditory Development Lab (PI Lori Leibold, PhD), we have developed a closed-set word recognition task to be used with children who are native speakers of Spanish. The ChEgSS task does not require that the audiologist have any knowledge of Spanish or that the child have any knowledge of English. Currently the software is being implemented and evaluated at collaborating clinical sites across the country. This project is funded by the NIH-NIDCD.
INDUSTRY COLLABORATIONS
Creare: We are developing a method and equipment that can perform in-ear calibrations & measure hearing thresholds.
Oticon Medical: We are assessing output levels and speech recognition outcomes for children who use different Ponto bone conduction devices.
Oticon Pediatrics: We evaluated sentence recognition outcomes for children using the EduMic remote microphone system in noisy & reverberant environments.