Studies related to hearing

Talker familiarity and speech perception in hearing-impaired individuals

Western Interdisciplinary Research Building (WIRB)

Familiar voices, that is, voices with which we have strong long-term familiarity with, are able to be more easily understood under challenging listening conditions.The goal of the present project is to investigate if familiar voices are easier to process than unfamiliar ones.

Understanding Fitness and Hearing Relationship in Adults with Hearing Loss

National Centre for Audiology (Elborn College)

We want to understand the relationship betweem hearing, cognition and fitness in older adults with hearing loss. Previous studies have looked at how much a clinical hearing test, called an audiogram, improves following completion of a fitness program. However, nobody has measured if this improvement translates into real-world hearing tasks like hearing in noise.

Voice familiarity effect on synthetic voices

Western Interdisciplinary Research Building (WIRB)

It is a known phenomenon that familiar voices, that is, voices with which we have strong long-term familiarity are processed differently by our brains. The goal of the present project is to investigate if modern computational tools are able to generate synthetic speech capable of eliciting similar familiarity effects to natural recordings of a participant's close friend or romantic partner.

Effects of voice familiarity

Western Interdisciplinary Research Building (WIRB)

Is the voice of that special someone also special to your brain? Do we process familiar voices in a way that is different than the voices of strangers? We are looking for couples interested in helping us answer this question!

Both male and female

18 years old to 40 years old

Couples