Lori Leibold Ph.D.
Senior Director • Center for Hearing Research
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Speaker Bio
Lori Leibold is the Senior Director of the Center for Hearing Research and the Director of the Human Auditory Development Laboratory at Boys Town National Research Hospital in Omaha, Nebraska. She reviewed her B.S. from McMaster University, M.Sc. from the University of Western Ontario, and her Ph.D. from the University of Washington. Her background is in audiology and developmental psychoacoustics. Her program of research investigates auditory development broadly, with a specific focus on how children learn to hear and understand speech in the presence of competing background sounds. This research involves individuals ranging in age from 4 months to 40 years, including infants and children with hearing loss, children and adults who speak both English and Spanish, and, most recently, children with Down syndrome.
Presentation title
Maturation of speech recognition in noisy environments
Brief description of presentation
Most prior studies of children’s speech recognition abilities have been conducted on monolingual children with normal hearing who are neurotypical, using well-characterized target stimuli presented in quiet. However, children spend their days listening to different talkers in noisy environments in which the acoustic cues associated with the target talker are variable and often degraded. This talk will provide an overview of the key findings of research conducted in the Human Auditory Development Laboratory focused on identifying factors that support maturation of speech perception in the presence of competing background sounds. Data will be presented that highlight the prolonged time course of development for recognizing target speech in the presence of competing speech relative to steady noise, highlighting potential mechanisms underlying this difference. Results from studies investigating effects of listener factors such as age, linguistic knowledge, hearing loss, and intellectual disability on children’s outcomes will be highlighted. Finally, the applicability of prior findings with respect to understanding the challenges children face when listening to speech in real-world environments will be discussed.
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