Assistant Professor Sarah F. Poissant of Communication Disorders Awarded Grant
Assistant Professor Sarah F. Poissant of Communication Disorders has been awarded a 2 year, $156,792 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD). The project, titled “Reverberation and Masking Interactions with Cochlear Implant Processing,” is designed to determine the impact of reverberation (i.e., echoes) and competing signals (e.g., other talkers) on speech understanding when limited spectral information is available, to understand the speech perception abilities of cochlear implant users in real-world listening environments, and to identify strategies for improving cochlear implant users' function in such environments. This project is the first known research effort made to understand and address concerns cochlear implant users express regarding their speech understanding ability in noisy, reverberant environments.
Poissant, along with co-principal investigator Dr. Nathaniel A. Whitmal (Communication Disorders) and collaborator Dr. Richard L. Freyman (Communication Disorders) will use computer simulations to examine the combined effects of reverberation, masking, and cochlear implant processing on speech understanding in 100 young adults with normal hearing. From these simulations they will determine the parameters most sensitive to measuring the detrimental effects of naturalistic acoustic conditions on speech perception and incorporate them into experiments that will test actual cochlear implant users. The results of this work will provide fundamental knowledge about both the nature of a cochlear implant user's ability to hear in real-life environments, and the effects that reduced access to a complete speech signal has on speech understanding in naturalistic settings. The work will ultimately aid in developing habilitative strategies that can improve function within these environments and relieve some of the burden of profound deafness on cochlear implant users in their everyday lives.
Department of Communication Disorders
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School of Public Health and Health Sciences
University of Massachusetts
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