Tim Beechey
Role: PhD Student/Researcher
Bio
T.B.C.
PhD title
Assessing communication efficiency for hearing rehabilitation.
PhD Project
Speech intelligibility tests currently employed within hearing research and clinical settings are based on repetition of simple words or sentences which are produced in a clear and careful manner. These tests are not designed to predict real-world communication abilities but have been adapted for this use from their initial purpose as site-of-lesion diagnostic tools.
Because standard speech intelligibility tests involve very different cognitive and linguistic demands from real-world conversation it is difficult to accurately assess the benefits of hearing rehabilitation using these tools. This project seeks to develop and test a framework for measuring the communication ability of people with hearing impairment during realistic conversation in ecologically valid acoustic environments. By more closely simulating real-world communication demands it is hoped that better predictions of aided performance and satisfaction can be obtained.
