Vijayalakshmi Easwar, Ph.D.
Meet the Researcher
Easwar is an audiologist who received clinical training in India and England and her doctorate in hearing science from Western University, Canada. She completed postdoctoral training at the Hospital for Sick Children, University of Toronto, and at the National Centre for Audiology, Western University. She is now an investigator at the Waisman Center and a visiting assistant professor at the department of communication sciences and disorders, both at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her 2019 Emerging Research Grant is generously funded by the Children’s Hearing Institute.
About three of every 1,000 infants are born with permanent hearing loss. With the implementation of newborn hearing screening programs worldwide, these infants are now identified soon after birth and provided with hearing aids at 2 to 3 months of age.
However, until 8 to 10 months of age, infants are not developmentally ready to participate in hearing tests. The only feasible method to infer if an infant’s hearing aids are providing adequate access to speech is through the use of neural measures. I am investigating the relationship between behavioral and neural measures of speech audibility in children ages 5 to 16 years old with congenital sensorineural hearing loss. In the future, I hope to apply these results to infants with hearing loss so we can infer hearing aid benefit as soon hearing aids are provided.
The project was inspired by my work as a pediatric audiologist in the National Health Service in Scotland. I saw firsthand the necessity for a clinical tool that could demonstrate to parents how hearing aids help their children, specifically infants, hear speech.
My grandfather developed a hearing loss in his 60s and wore hearing aids. While his devices were very helpful in most situations, he still had difficulty communicating when there were several competing sounds. It helped me see the practical challenges that my patients—children with hearing loss, and their families—may need to overcome. My long-term goal is to understand how children with hearing loss encode time-based properties in speech that
individuals with typical hearing use to hear better in noise.
In the past 10 years, I have lived in four different countries (India, the U.K., Canada, the U.S.) and seven different cities to train and work as an audiologist and a researcher. I also speak four languages: English, Tamil, Hindi, and Kannada. I also love to bike and hike, so if I were not a researcher I’d be a travel blogger or park ranger. New experiences help reset my thinking, and hiking in the mountains improves my perseverance. I owe my appreciation of nature to my biology teacher. She inspired us to constantly be curious about how living organisms function. I vividly remember her teaching photosynthesis to our class, more than two decades ago!
Vijayalakshmi Easwar, Ph.D., is funded by The Children’s Hearing Institute (CHI). We thank CHI for its generous support of innovative research focused on congenital and acquired childhood hearing loss and its causes, assessment, diagnosis, and treatment.
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The Research
University of Wisconsin–Madison
Neural correlates of amplified speech in children with sensorineural hearing loss
About three of every 1,000 infants are born with permanent hearing loss. With the implementation of newborn hearing screening programs worldwide, infants born with hearing loss are now identified soon after birth and provided with hearing aids as early as 3 months of age. However, until infants are 8 to 10 months of age and can participate in clinical tests, the use of neural measures is the only feasible method to infer an infant’s hearing ability with hearing aids. This project will investigate the relationship between behavioral and neural measures of speech audibility in children ages 5 to 16 years old with congenital sensorineural hearing loss, who are capable of reliably indicating hearing sounds. Specifically, the project will use speech-elicited, envelope-following responses—a type of scalp-recorded measure that reflects neural activity to periodicity in speech. Study findings will reveal the accuracy of the chosen neural measure in confirming whether speech sounds are audible in children with congenital hearing loss when hearing aids are used. Results will inform future investigations and the clinical feasibility of using neural measures to assess hearing aid benefit in infants with hearing loss who are unable to confirm their detection of speech behaviorally.
Long-term goal: To use speech-elicited neural measures to quantify hearing aid benefit in infants soon after they are fit with hearing aids. The use of neural measures may enable confirmation of inadequate hearing aid benefit earlier than methods that rely on infants’ participation in hearing tests and, in turn, accelerate clinical decisions for improved access to speech.