Babies are too young to do hearing tests until 8 to 10 months of age, and at such young ages, tracking brain waves to sounds is the only reliable way to assess hearing.
Brain Connectivity Patterns in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder
Individuals with autism spectrum disorder had different patterns of brain connectivity between areas involved in speech processing, particularly in the parietal region, which is important for combining different sounds into speech objects.
How Can We Measure Hearing Aid Success in the Youngest Patients?
We found that the use of neural responses to sound to infer how well hearing aids—a common first form of intervention—provide access to speech is similar in children to that found in adults.
Improving How to Assess Speech Production
During typical conversational interactions, humans use over 100 different muscles in the vocal tract to produce up to six to nine syllables per second, which is one of the fastest types of motor behavior.
From Reading Faces to Publishing Research
I spent the first 20 years of my life attempting to hide my congenital hearing loss. Like most kids, I just wanted to fit in and be like everyone else, so my younger self could have never predicted that I would have ended up focusing on disability and hearing health within my career.
Pinpointing How Older Adults Can Better Hear Speech in Noise
In real-world listening situations, we always listen to speech in the presence of other sources of masking, or competing sounds. One of the major sources of masking in such situations is the speech signal that the listener is not paying attention to. The process of understanding the target speech in the presence of a masking speech involves separating the acoustic information of the target speech and tuning out masker speech.
Autism-Related Language Difficulties Tied to Involuntary Attention Capture
We examined data from individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typically developing (TD) peers while they listened to both meaningful and meaningless sentences. ASD individuals show significantly stronger cortical responses to meaningless compared with meaningful speech in the same canonical language regions where TD individuals exhibit stronger responses to meaningful speech.
Measuring Children’s Ability to Hear Speech in Different Competing Backgrounds
Young children spend much of their day listening in noise. However, it is clear that, compared with adults, infants and children are highly susceptible to interference from competing background sounds.
Do Transparent Face Coverings Help With Communication?
Shortly after the pandemic began, we began collecting various types of face coverings (transparent and nontransparent) to study the sound quality using a broad noise presented through a styrofoam mannequin head with a speaker mounted in its mouth.
Train Your Brain to Listen
One of the most important things a person with hearing loss can do is to develop listening strategies. Auditory training, or auditory rehabilitation, is essentially a formal program for teaching the brain to recognize speech and other sounds that may not be as clear as they are with typical hearing.