Z. Ellen Peng, Ph.D.

Meet the Researcher

Peng received her doctorate in engineering from University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at RWTH Aachen University in Germany and is now a research associate at the Waisman Center and a lecturer at the department of communication sciences and disorders, both at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Peng’s 2020 Emerging Research Grant is generously funded by Royal Arch Research Assistance, which was renewed for a second year in 2022.

The origin of my present research goes way back: In my college application, I wrote that I wanted to study how poor indoor acoustics affects kids’ ability to learn. At the time, my high school had decided to put in a loudspeaker system without altering classroom interiors, and afterward, I noticed I had a hard time concentrating in class, possibly because it took too much effort to fully hear everything. This high school experience and my subsequent training led to my current project.

Through early cochlear implant (CI) fitting, many children diagnosed with profound hearing loss gain access to verbal communication and, through electrical hearing, go on to develop spoken language. But despite good speech outcomes as tested in the sound booth, many children who use CIs experience difficulty understanding speech in most noisy and reverberant indoor environments, like classrooms. I will be using acoustic virtual reality and measures of neural activity to better understand how CIs process degraded speech in adverse sound environments.

My dad, an acoustician, taught me how to do logarithmic decibel addition before multiplication—it was fun to show this off as a second grader! As a young kid, I also saw my mom, a pediatrician, working overnight in the NICU (unintended “bring your daughter to work” experiences!) and where I remember seeing very sick babies. I think this primed me for a career using science/ engineering to help children in need.

So it was not a personal connection to hearing loss that led me to what I do now. It was more the realization that not every child has a fair start in life, and wondering how can I make it more fair? I am grateful to have the technical background and scientific training to contribute to making this world a better place for children with hearing loss.

I’m bilingual in Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese, and I managed to teach myself Korean after I met my husband, who’s from South Korea. In Germany I could eventually understand 10 to 20 percent. Now I enjoy confusing and teaching our toddler the names for various objects in different languages!

Z. Ellen Peng, Ph.D., is a Royal Arch Research Assistance award recipient. Hearing Health Foundation thanks the Royal Arch Masons for their ongoing commitment to research in the area of central auditory processing disorder.

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The Research

University of Wisconsin-Madison
Investigating cortical processing during comprehension of reverberant speech in adolescents and young adults with cochlear implants

Through early cochlear implant (CI) fitting, many children diagnosed with profound neurosensorial hearing loss gain access to verbal communications through electrical hearing and go on to develop spoken language. Despite good speech outcomes tested in sound booths, many children experience difficulties in understanding speech in most noisy and reverberant indoor environments. While up to 75 percent of their time learning is spent in classrooms, the difficulty from adverse acoustics adding to children’s processing of degraded speech from CI is not well understood. In this project, we examine speech understanding in classroom-like environments through immersive acoustic virtual reality. In addition to behavioral responses, we measure neural activity using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS)—a noninvasive, CI-compatible neuroimaging technique, in cortical regions that are responsible for speech understanding and sustained attention. Our findings will reveal the neural signature of speech processing by CI users, who developed language through electrical hearing, in classroom-like environments with adverse room acoustics.

Long-term goal: To understand the impact of profound childhood hearing loss treated by cochlear implants on both behavioral outcomes and neural mechanisms involved in understanding speech in adverse auditory environments. This work will add to our knowledge in developing personalized clinical device fitting strategies for children with hearing loss to enhance communication and learning in realistic indoor environments.