Applied Hearing Science Lab at UW

Congratulations to Akhila Tirupasur, another SPHSC recipient of a Mary Gates Scholarship for Spring 2024! Sara is a postbac in the Speech and Hearing Sciences degree who is looking to pursue a Master's in Speech-Language Pathology in the Fall. Mary Gates Scholarships are competitive awards granted to undergraduate students conducting research at the University of Washington. The award is intended to enhance the student’s educational experience and encourage them to use innovation to impact the world. These awards not only recognize undergraduate student potential, but also provide funds to enhance the quality of their research and reduce their financial burden.

Akhila is currently working on a Speech and Hearing Sciences research project under the mentorship of Dr. Yi Shen.

The Quiet Part Loud: Our Life with My Husband's Hearing Loss Its toll can be invisible—even to me. But a new wave of tech could change everything

Being able to track the rhythmic regularities in speech is critical for speech understanding in competing backgrounds. Here is our fifth paper on this topic!

Contribution of speech rhythm to understanding speech in noisy conditions: Further test of a selective entrainment hypothesis - Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics Previous work by McAuley et al. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 82, 3222–3233, (2020), Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, 83, 2229–2240, (2021) showed that disruption of the natural rhythm of target (attended) speech worsens speech recognition in the presence of competing background ...

Fitting psychophysical curves for speech-recognition-in-vehicle data? We've done it.

The Utilization of Psychometric Functions to Predict Speech Intelligibility in Vehicles Abstract In this study, a novel assessment approach of in-vehicle speech intelligibility is presented using psychometric curves. Speech recognition performance scores were modeled at an individual listener level for a set of sp

Applied Hearing Science Lab at UW Exploring technological solutions for everyday hearing challenges

Dylan's second first-author paper is out! What a one-two punch! In this article, Dylan has demonstrated that older adults may have increased difficulties of leveraging rhythmic regularity in a target sound for selective listening...

The effect of rhythm on selective listening in multiple-source environments for young and older adults Understanding continuous speech with competing background sounds is challenging, particularly for older adults. One stimulus property that may aid lis…

Dylan Pearson's first first-author paper is out. Check it out!

Differential sensitivity to speech rhythms in young and older adults Sensitivity to the temporal properties of auditory patterns tends to be poorer in older listeners, and this has been hypothesized to be one factor contributing to their poorer speech understanding. This study examined sensitivity to speech rhythms in young and older normal-hearing subjects, using a....

Congrats to Khloe Sytsma, whose project "Assessing User Experiences of Self-guided Hearing-aid Fitting Using Smart Phones" has received the Recognition Award from the University of Washington Population Health Initiative!

Honorees announced for 2023 undergraduate research recognition awards The Population Health Initiative announced it has granted Population Health Recognition Awards to 26 students – representing 20 different projects – who are participating in the Undergraduate...

Does the presence of envelope fluctuations in the background noise change how speech cues in various frequency bands are being used? Apparently...

JASA EXPRESS LETTERS

The current study demonstrated that the listeners’ spectral weights while performing a speech recognition task using sentences depended on whether an 8-Hz amplitude modulation was applied to the competing background noise masker. https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0017934

UW Speech and Hearing Sciences

Third time at the American Auditory Society meeting and we finally did Camelback. Perfect sunrise!

The first in-person ARO in three years for AHSLAB! Erik is explaining an adaptive stimulus selection algorithm that could drastically reduce the time to estimate ABR thresholds.

The developers at AHSLAB are hard at work! We are designing and building accessible mobile apps for older adults to fit hearing aids on their own.

Check out Donghyeon's new paper about assessing the signal quality at the output of hearing aids. https://doi.org/10.1044/2022_AJA-22-00023
Donghyeon is completing his AuD/PhD program at IU. This paper is one of the first from his dissertation!