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The Listen Lab explores speech communication,
focusing on the challenges faced by people with hearing loss
Listening effort
Listening effort
For individuals with hearing loss, listening can be exhausting, and it can be a barrier to social interaction.
We study effort using pupillometry, where an infrared camera tracks changes in pupil size in real time as you listen to speech. Your pupils grow larger as your brain is trying harder, and we can use those changes to better understand the moments where a person is struggling.
Lab director Matthew Winn and Ph.D. candidate Michael Smith are the lead researchers in this area.
Cochlear Implants
Cochlear Implants
For people who have severe-profound hearing loss who communicate by talking and listening, cochlear implants can be used to partially restore a sense of hearing. They also have some limitations in sound quality that can interfere with listening. We study the challenges faced by those who use cochlear implants as they are listening to speech.
PROSODY
PROSODY
Prosody is the way that we signal the important part of a message, our agreement with information, and our emotional state. To hear these things, we need to hear changes in pitch, loudness, or timing of speech. Some of these details are not transmitted very well by cochlear implants, so we design experiments to figure out a person's ability to hear prosodic emphasis and the strategy they use to do it.
This work is led by Ph.D. candidate Harley Wheeler.
Audio-VISUAL Integration
Audio-VISUAL Integration
When you see a talker's face, you might change the way you interpret what they are saying. We create experiments that allow a listener to use visual cues to recover from mistakes, to fill in information that was missing from the audio, and to infer the most important part of a talker's message.
This work is led by Justin Fleming, Ph.D.
Perception of
social cues
Perception of
social cues
When you hear a person's voice, you don't just hear the words - you hear their intention, their gender, their age, and the community that they are from. We measure the ways that talkers express these details, and translate those measurements into methods that can be used in scientific experiments on perception.
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