Our Research
The Audiovisual Speech Processing Laboratory investigates how visual cues, such as lip-reading, assist both children and adults in understanding speech, particularly in noisy environments.
Understanding the Importance of Visual Cues for Children
As adults, we look at visual cues on the talker's face to compensate for noisy environments. Children have more difficulty understanding speech in noisy environments and less is known about their ability to use visual speech cues in noise.
Our recent studies have explored topics such as how face masks impact speech perception and word learning in children and where children look while listening to someone talk in noisy environments. One of our primary goals is to better understand whether visual speech cues affect how effortful it is for children to understand speech.
Frequently Asked Questions
Visual speech helps in many ways. It helps us to know when to listen, fills in missing auditory speech information, and helps to separate speech from similar competing sounds. We are studying how well children at various ages can use visual speech in these different ways. Experiments examine how sensitive children are to different audiovisual cues and how much these different mechanisms contribute to individual differences in children's audiovisual speech enhancement.
Frequency specific audibility is a measure of how much speech a person can hear at each pitch. The more hearing loss there is at a certain pitch, the poorer the audibility. Our lab is studying how frequency specific audibility affects how much speech children can understand when talking with someone face-to-face. We expect that lipreading is more helpful for children who have hearing loss at higher pitches because lipreading helps fill in the “blanks" of the high-pitched speech sounds they cannot hear. Using the information from this study, audiologists will be able to use frequency specific audibility to better estimate how much speech a child with hearing loss can understand when talking with someone face-to-face. This may help guide decisions about speech and language therapy.
