The main focus of our work at the Hearing Science Laboratory is to study how people process speech and to understand how hearing loss and age effects peoples’ ability to perceive speech. The long-term goal of our work is to improve hearing aid technology.

We use and develop novel measures to provide insight into how listeners process speech including; weighting functions, to assess the listening strategies an individual uses to process spectral information in speech; response times, which is an indication of ease of listening; analyses of speech errors, to identify the acoustic features of speech a listener has trouble processing, and fMRI to identify neuroanatomical areas associated with processing complex auditory stimuli.