Webinar 3 - Fellows' presentations (part 1/3)

About

Research Presentations

24th June 2015 - Moderators: Benson Hsu & Katharina Vogt

Tobias Busch

A big sample of CI data logs has been collected by Cochlear in cooperation with clinics around the world. From these we extract normative data about the everyday acoustical experience of CI users. We focus on changes over the lifespan and differences between regions. In the webinar I will present insights that we have gained from that analysis.

One of the biggest challenges when working with a messy convenience sample like this one is getting to grips with its complexity. I will introduce a simple interactive plotting tool that - among other things - can help with exploring and visualizing data.

Yasmeen Hamza

Sonority’s role as a speech surface cue in CI Children

Sonority is defined as the degree of openness of the vocal tract during production of the phoneme or the degree of relative loudness. Accordingly phonemes can be classified on a so-called sonority scale. Languages typically impose severe restrictions on the ability of speech sounds to follow one another in phonological strings, and this has been attributed to sonority sequencing principle. The current study aims to investigate the effect of sonority on lexical processing by CI children and their facility for tapping into phonological grammar during lexical access. Specifically, we will examine whether the auditory capacity for speech perception of children with a CI is affected by sonority values of speech and whether the sonority constraints are internalized as language learning rules in CI relative to NH children. Thus we are studying the effect of sonority on the perception of phonemes or syllables at a segmental level as well as on lexical stress and the lexical acquisition across languages.

Anouk Sangen

I will start with telling you where I am with my research now, shortly explaining the results of the first study of my project, which focusses on school-aged children with severe-to-profound unilateral hearing loss (UHL). Based on our results, and the literature, we suggest that intervention is needed for these children.

Then I want to discuss conclusions of a recent paper (Gordon, Henkin & Kral, 2015) that advocates early intervention for UHL and explains why this is so important. This very relevant for my second study (that we are starting up at this moment), which is going to provide intervention for very young children with UHL and follow the auditory, linguistic and cognitive development of the participants.