Category: Cochlear Implants

OSU at ASHA

11/20/2022

This weekend, I went to ASHA in New Orleans with two undergrads in my lab, Bailey Smith and Mary Vang, to present work on how employers judge CI users as potential job applicants after listening to speech samples. Several other OSU faculty and students also attended and presented -- possibly our best showing in years. I'm so glad we're able to support student research and professional development at a national level!

Revisions

10/3/2022

This has been a busy few weeks, with three revisions recently submitted to journals:

"Employers’ speech-based first impressions of cochlear implant users," Part 3 of my series on how listeners judge the personalities and competence of cochlear implant users
"Production and perception of prevelar merger: Two-dimensional comparisons using Pillai scores and confusion matrices," which addresses the challenge of comparing continuous vowel production measures with responses from discrete perception tasks
"Dysarthric speech familiarization: Distributed practice and interleaving," spearheaded by Mik Martinelli, former linguistics grad student and now faculty at Midwestern State, and my OSU colleagues Sara Loss and Sabiha Parveen

Part 3 accepted

9/22/2022

Part 3 of a series of experiments about listeners' evaluations of cochlear implant speech has been accepted to the Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education. Titled "Employers’ speech-based first impressions of cochlear implant users," hiring managers rated talkers with typical hearing most positively, followed by highly-intelligible CI users and then less-intelligible CI users -- the same patterns as in Parts 1 and 2 (both 2018), which used college students listeners. Listeners didn't know the talkers were deaf. This unconscious bias could have negative effects on deaf/hard-of-hearing employment opportunities.

Three papers submitted

2/24/2022

This has been a busy winter, with three new manuscripts recently submitted to journals:

"Employers’ speech-based first impressions of cochlear implant users," Part 3 of my series on how listeners judge the personalities and competence of cochlear implant users
"Production and perception of prevelar merger: Two-dimensional comparisons using Pillai scores," which addresses the challenge of comparing continuous vowel production measures with responses from discrete perception tasks
"Dysarthric speech familiarization: Distributed practice and interleaving," spearheaded by Mik Martinelli, former linguistics grad student and now faculty at Midwestern State, and my OSU colleagues Sara Loss and Sabiha Parveen

Sociolinguistics and hearing loss survey

5/27/2020

My grad student Madison Pearson has created a survey for people with hearing loss and their friends and families about how hearing loss affects social aspects of life and communication. This will be the first piece of the Deaf Experience, Deaf Expression (DXDX) project (which also includes hard-of-hearing folks). We're especially in need of cochlear implant users and their families, but people with all levels of hearing loss are welcome. See the lab webpage or contact me for details.

ASHFoundation grant proposal submitted!

4/16/2020

I have submitted a proposal for a New Investigators Research Grant, which supports one-year projects for junior faculty. This project focuses on conversations among young adults with cochlear implants and how listeners react to them.

ASHA Orlando

11/23/2019

I gave a talk "Speech Intelligibility, Deaf Speech Quality, & Personality Ratings" at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association convention in Orlando. This was my first time attending ASHA, and the first conference presentation for my long-term project about listeners' impressions of cochlear implant users. In this phase, I'm looking for cues that listeners pick up on when they perceive CI users as having some sort of accent. I had some great discussions with other attendees about my initial results, and I hope the rest of the analysis will help explain the patterns I reported in the first two papers in the project.

Paid online study: Voice Perception in Job Interviews

10/25/2019

If you interview and hire people as part of your job, you are likely eligible for my new online study about how hiring managers perceive the voices of job applicants and what traits can be conveyed in the voice. Participants will listen to recordings and give their impressions of “applicants” for various jobs. It takes about 30-40 minutes, and you will receive a $10 Amazon card by email as compensation.
Complete the survey online: https://is.gd/skO5MF

ASA in Victoria

11/18/2018

Recently returned from the Acoustical Society of America meeting in Victoria BC. My poster "Salience of cochlear implant users' speech rate" reported what feel like null results, but discussing possible reasons why people didn't do what I predicted was a big help for determining my next steps. Plus it was good to catch up with colleagues from the Northwest and see old friends in Seattle.

Mt Rainier from the plane

First

Last