Shivali Appaiah

Role: PhD Student

Bio

Shivali completed her Bachelors in Speech and Hearing in 2012 from Dr M.V Shetty College of Speech and Hearing, University of Mangalore, India. She received her Master’s in Audiology and Speech Language Pathology from the Manipal University, India. She has completed her Master’s Thesis on “Verbal Fluency in Kannada- English Bilingual Adults: Effects of Language proficiency, Usage and Age of L2 Acquisition”. Her areas of interest involve auditory processing, cognition, speech perception and diagnostic Audiology.

PhD title

Efficacy of auditory training in adults with hearing loss and auditory processing disorders

PhD Project

The main focus of the current study is to investigate the benefits of auditory training for adults with sensorineural hearing loss that is classed as bilateral (both ears) and moderate to moderately severe in nature.

Recent literature reports that adults with hearing loss are likely to have additional auditory processing deficits. The question remains if the auditory training is targeting the auditory processing deficits within the population with hearing loss. There are two key aims to this research:

  • to investigate the benefits of auditory training in adults with auditory processing disorders, without hearing loss, to tease out auditory training benefits (i.e. is the training targeting the hearing loss or the auditory processing problems);
  • to identify whether the auditory training is sufficient to improve speech perception in noise in adults with hearing loss and auditory processing deficit.

The research will also look to identify the role of auditory, linguistic and cognitive skills among adults with hearing loss when understanding speech in noise.

PhD supervisor

Mr John Newell, Macquarie University

Jessica Monaghan, Macquarie University