Optimizing hearing aids for speech intelligibility, sound quality and emotional speech

The lack of correspondence between the clinic setting and real world listening environments may explain, in part, why hearing instruments optimized in the clinic often result in poor adherence of hearing instruments in everyday life. To address the disconnect between communication in everyday listening situations where talkers often speak with emotion and audiology clinics where test speech materials consist of tokens recorded with a monotonic and/or neutral intonation, the proposed research will assess hearing impaired listeners with regard to speech understanding, emotion understanding, physiological response to emotional speech, and self reported experience of emotional speech. Different studies will focus on different aspects of the problem and with different
listening conditions (e.g., with hearing aids and without).

Faculty Supervisor:

Frank Russo;Kathleen Pichora-Fuller;Frank Rudzicz

Student:

Partner:

Unitron Hearing;Phonak Canada Ltd

Discipline:

Life Sciences

Sector:

Health and Related Sciences & Technology; Biotechnology

University:

Toronto Metropolitan University; University of Toronto

Program: