My primary area of expertise is in psychoacoustics and speech perception. Psychoacoustics is a branch of hearing science that uses behavioral responses to acoustic stimuli to study auditory processes and perception. This reductionist approach assumes that a better understanding of the processing of simple sounds, such as pure tones, can help us better understand the processing of more complex, naturally meaningful sounds, such as speech. While some of my work focuses on low-level processes, such as frequency discrimination abilities, a major theme in many projects is to synthesize information about low-level processes to gain a better understanding of higher-level processes, such as the ability to combine information across frequency to more effectively separate signals of interest from background noise. This ability is particularly important in the context of speech perception with a speech background. I have focused my efforts to date in three main areas of psychoacoustics: auditory processing in normal-hearing young adults, the development of auditory processing in children, and effects of hearing impairment.
