Achievement

An interdisciplinary team led by participating faculty Jont Allen has made fundamental and surprising discoveries related to the understanding of hearing impairment and consonant recognition, which are the most important sounds for speech understanding. They have shown that there is little correlation between hearing threshold and the ability to recognize certain consonant sounds in noise, in contrast to current assumptions. They have shown that the initial acoustic burst, rather than the transition into a following vowel, is the key feature for recognizing plosive consonants, and they have for the first time broken down the individual consonants' contributions to the overall intelligibility of speech to individual impaired ears. These results may ultimately greatly improve hearing aids for millions of Americans.