Teaching, Learning, and Research Hub
This presentation explores how the brain automatically separates overlapping sounds into distinct streams, raising the question of what happens to information we aren’t actively attending to. The following is a transcript of the presentation video, edited for clarity. Good morning. I first want to thank Karen for inviting me. I...
This presentation introduces a beam-forming hearing aid that uses eye tracking to help listeners focus on one voice, describing gains for hearing-impaired users but tradeoffs in spatial awareness. The following is a transcript of the presentation video, edited for clarity. Thank you Karen, and thank you for inviting me here...
This presentation traces how children learn to pick out one voice from competing speech, revealing that even school-age kids struggle with skills adults use automatically in noisy settings. The following is a transcript of the presentation video, edited for clarity. Thank you very much to Karen for inviting me to...
This presentation focuses on speech perception outcomes when people with one or two cochlear implants listen in test environment simulations of restaurants and cocktail parties The following is a transcript of the presentation video, edited for clarity. I’m going to talk about speech understanding in simulations of complex environments by...
This presentation examines why older adults struggle to follow speech amid competing conversations, pointing to cognitive factors that matter even when hearing loss alone does not explain the difficulty. I’m Karen Helfer from the University of Massachusetts and today I’m going to be talking about aging and how aging affects...
One of the cool things of my lab is that there are so many different people. There’s a good number of engineers, a good number of audiologists, but we also interact with people with a background in computational linguistics or physiology, sometimes basic physiologists. The name of my lab is...
Researchers can get started with community-based participatory research approaches by seeking out and incorporating the knowledge of clients into their research questions and study designs What is consumer-informed research? The traditional idea of research is that it’s investigator initiated. And so researchers, who may have differing levels of engagement in...
This talk focuses on the parallels and differences in early risk markers, developmental trajectories and neurocognitive mechanisms in autism and specific language impairment The following is a transcript of the presentation video, edited for clarity. The overview of my talk is I’ll start by introducing Autism Spectrum Disorder and then...
I think one continuing question, and one that we’ve had for a long time is, “Why do older people have difficulty understanding speech?” What exactly changes with age? Is it hearing loss? Is it attenuation from peripheral hearing loss? Is it something else going on in the cochlea? Is it...
In recent, I can almost say recent decades now, I’ve been very active in cross-linguistic research. Initially I was focused on English-speaking children, and we really had a handle on what these children are like. There are some individual differences, of course. Somewhere along the line, I read something about...