Much of the hospital's success in identifying and treating children with hearing loss is the result of the rapid transfer of research findings from laboratories to clinic and bedside.

Areas of Research - Clinical and Behavioral Studies of Human Communication - Hearing Aid Research Laboratory

Developmental Studies

In order to provide optimal amplification to infants with hearing loss it is essential to understand how the acoustic needs of children differ from those of adults and how these needs might change over time. A series of experiments are being conducted to determine which traits are age dependent and how these dependencies might influence the hearing-aid evaluation and fitting process. In order to separate general developmental trends from traits that are a consequence of hearing loss, the proposed work also includes normal-hearing children and adults. To minimize the effects of prior experience and linguistic competence on performance, the majority of tasks involve the recognition or discrimination of nonsense syllables. In most studies, data are collected at multiple levels in order to construct performance-intensity functions. While time-consuming, this allows us to determine the minimal levels of audibility for specific levels of performance. Whenever possible, audibility of the test signals is calculated on an individual basis (using probe microphone measures) to provide an objective correlate with performance that ultimately could be incorporated into clinical hearing-aid fitting procedures. Studies include:

• Effect of earmold fit on predicted real ear SPL using a real ear to coupler difference procedure.
• The relation between stimulus context, speech audibility, and perception for normal and hearing impaired children.
• The effect of stimulus bandwidth on the perception of /s/ in normal- and hearing-impaired children and adults.
• Developmental differences in the spectral characteristics of self-generated speech.
• Relation between audibility of the amplified short-term spectrum and phoneme recognition
• Aided perception of /s/ and /z/ by hearing-impaired children .
• Audiometric configuration, symmetry, and progression of loss.