Learning to read is a complex process that requires integration across sensory, cognitive, and linguistic processes. Accordingly, there are numerous process that may lead to early reading difficulties. The earlier these difficulties are found, the more effective interventions can be, and the deleterious effects of falling behind in reading cannot...
Otoacoustic emissions are currently used for various clinical purposes; however, stimulus frequency otoacoustic emissions (SFOAEs) evoked using a single one are not utilized clinically due to uncertainties regarding their generation mechanism, their spatial source(s) in the cochlea, and their susceptibility to various cochlear insults, particularly in humans. Over the years,...
The nonlinear attributes of cochlear function are fascinating. Responses are compressed with surprisingly little distortion, different stimuli interact in competitive ways, and tones are created either with or without acoustic stimulation. Moreover, because of their dynamism, these nonlinear phenomena have provided an invaluable means for noninvasively probing and understanding cochlear...
In everyday conversations, listeners need to rapidly perceive and parse speech input as they receive it. While listeners with normal hearing may do this with relative ease, this is a multi-step process that requires listeners to recognize individual speech sounds as meaningful then integrate them to understand and respond almost...
Speech recognition in complex acoustic environments is dependent on myriad bottom-up (i.e., peripheral) and top-down (i.e., central) processes. While bottom-up processes remain fairly stable during childhood, the development of top-down processes persists into young adulthood. The immaturity of top-down processes places younger children at considerable risk for poorer speech recognition...
This thesis focuses on the development of a cochlear implant (CI) that uses photons to stimulate surviving auditory neurons in severe-to-profoundly deaf individuals. The benefit of optical over electrical stimulation is its spatial selectivity with the potential to create significantly more independent channels to encode acoustic information and likely enhances...