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

Perceptual strategies & acclimatization

The first goal of these studies is to determine if children with mild to moderately-severe hearing losses have the capacity to utilize multiple forms of acoustic information provided that the relevant aspects of the signal can be made sufficiently audible. In these studies, the abilities of hearing-impaired children to alter listening strategies and adapt to changes in signal processing will be assessed. This information should provide insight into the fundamental ability of children with hearing loss to utilize an impoverished signal. The second goal is to explore how well children with hearing loss can adapt to changes in acoustic input and determine the time course of this adaptation. In these latter studies, a novel word learning approach will be used to study acclimatization. If this technique is successful, it may lead to a clinical tool for studying the efficacy of emerging technology in this population. Studies include:

• Perception of voiceless fricatives by normal-hearing and hearing-impaired children and adults.
  
• Influence of hearing loss on the perceptual strategies of normal and hearing-impaired children and adults.
  
• Novel word learning in normal-hearing and hearing-impaired children.
  
• The effect of stimulus bandwidth of learning rate for novel stimuli.
  
• Acclimatization to changes in signal processing by hearing-impaired children.