HESP Seminar Series | HESP l Hearing and Speech Sciences Department l University of Maryland

The HESP Department sponsors a series of talks on current research in the areas of hearing, speech, and language by visiting researchers or members of the HESP faculty, staff, and students. All students, faculty, staff, and affiliates are welcome and encouraged to attend. If you would like to join the email distribution list for all upcoming HESP Seminar Series talks, email Dr. Matthew Goupell at goupell [at] umd.edu or Dr. Jose Ortiz at jortiz5 [at] umd.edu.

Events are listed below, or access the HESP Seminar Series calendar.

Spring 2025

Date/Time/Location	Speaker/Topic
Date: February 10 Time: 12:00pm-12:50pm Location: Lefrak 2166	Enhancing Agency in Communication through Co-Design Speaker: Stephanie Valencia (UMD, College of Information Sciences) Abstract: Agency and communication are integral to personal development, enabling us topursue and express our goals. However, agency in communication is not static–Many individuals who use speech-generating devices to communicate encounter social constraints and barriers that reduce their agency in conversation including how much they can say, how they can say it, and when they can say it. In this talk, I will explore how adopting an agency-centered design framework can lead to more accessible communication experiences. By focusing on the perspectives and needs of people with disabilities, we can develop technologies that genuinely support their agency in conversation. Drawing from empirical studies and co-design sessions with individuals with disabilities, I will discuss how various technological tools—such as automated transcription, physical artifacts, and AI-driven language generation—can be used to enhance conversational agency. I will also present practical design methods and guidelines for creating inclusive, empowering communication technologies.
Date: February 24 Time: 12:00pm-12:50pm Location: Lefrak 2166	The interplay between perceptual and cognitive factors during speech perception in challenging environments Speaker: Jing Shen (Temple University) Abstract: Real-life communication environments often contain multiple adverse conditions that are perceptually and cognitively challenging, such as background noise, acoustic degradation, and linguistic complexity. These conditions can create negative compound effects on speech perception in challenging environments, but their combined impact and the interactive mechanisms are poorly understood. This challenge is further aggravated by age-related hearing loss, resulting in older adults’ difficulty with speech communication in real-life environments, with a significant impact on their physical and psychological well-being. To provide effective audiological services for improving older adults’ speech perception in challenging environments, it is critical to understand how multiple perceptual and cognitive factors interact in influencing older adults’ speech perception outcomes. In this talk, I will present behavioral and pupillometry data from a series of experiments to reveal the complex interplay. I will also discuss the future directions in this line of work that can lead to development of clinical assessments and interventions with strong ecological validity.
Date: March 14th Time: 10:00am-11:00am Location: Lefrak 2166	Innovative technologies advancing diagnoses and treatment in hearing and voice. Speaker: Dr. David A. Eddins (University of Central Florida) Abstract: This presentation will highlight innovative technologies grounded in basic acoustics and psychoacoustics to address three different challenges in CSD. The first challenge is effective treatment of sound sensitivity disorder (i.e., loudness hyperacusis). Current barriers to treatment will be discussed along with a novel treatment that has produced encouraging initial results. The second challenge is to improve the rigor, reproducibility, and outcomes of voice quality assessment to support quantification of clinical change. Inspired by basic psychoacoustics and psychophysics, the goal is to improve diagnostic methods used to quantify voice quality through perceptual and computational methods that are amenable to clinical use. The third challenge is to promote increased inclusion of respiratory assessment in standard clinical voice evaluations. The development of a low-cost, accessible, highly effective, and ergonomic solutions will be discussed. Basic principles, current successes, potential capabilities, and aspirational goals will be highlighted.
Date: April 7 Time: 12:00pm-12:50 pm Location: Lefrak 2166	The Impact of Age, Stimulation Level, and Electrode-to-Neural Interface on Temporal Processing Deficits in Cochlear Implant Users Speaker: Angelina Bilokon (UMD HESP) Abstract: Cochlear-implant (CI) performance outcomes are highly variable. One factor contributing to this variability may be age-related deficits in temporal processing, which can be assessed through recovery from forward masking (RFM). Older CI participants exhibit longer RFM functions, particularly in regions with a poor electrode-to-neural interface (ENI). ENI is a combination of peripheral neural and non-neural factors that impact the effectiveness of electrical stimulation. Additionally, temporal processing deficits appear to be exacerbated with increasing stimulation levels of speech stimuli, potentially due to a central processing deficit. However, level-dependent temporal processing deficits have not yet been thoroughly established through controlled direct stimulation experiments. This study aims to investigate the effects of stimulation level on RFM, measured at electrodes with varying ENI. We hypothesized that older CI participants would exhibit longer RFM than younger participants, especially at higher stimulation levels and in regions with poorer ENI. Participants were recruited across the lifespan (ages 35-85 years). For each participant, ENI was assessed across the entire electrode array using the slope of the evoked compound action potential (ECAP) amplitude growth function and the slope of multipulse integration (MPI). Electrodes with the best, median, and worst ENI were selected for further analysis. After electrode selection, the participant's dynamic ranges (DR) were measured for both the masker (200 ms) and the target (20 ms) stimuli on individual electrodes. RFM thresholds were assessed with varying masker levels (40%, 65%, 90% DR) and masker-target intervals (MTI: 0, 50, 100, 150, 200, 250, 300 ms). As expected, data showed variability in RFM across participants and electrode locations. RFM was notably longer at higher masker levels. Critically, the current results suggest a potential interaction between age, stimulation level, and ENI in affecting RFM, particularly in older CI participants, which aligns with our hypothesis. Understanding the roles of peripheral versus central factors in temporal processing deficits could offer insights into speech perception abilities in CI users. Furthermore, these findings could provide individualized, age-specific programming guidance for clinicians.
Date: April 18th Time: 2:30pm Location: Morrill 1101	Unraveling the Linguistic Locus of Stuttering from Childhood to Adulthood Speaker: Carly Rosvold Description: HESP M.A. Thesis Defense Zoom Link: https://zoom.us/j/97164061169 Abstract: The idea that stuttering shifts from function words in early childhood to content words in adulthood has shaped decades of research and clinical thinking. But how solid is the foundation beneath that claim? This thesis revisits a familiar pattern with fresh eyes, through three lenses often overlooked in tandem: the conceptual limits of binary word categories, the methodological inconsistencies in how disfluency is measured, and the population-level oversights that come from treating children who stutter as a homogeneous group. Drawing on longitudinal data from children who either recovered or persisted, this study explores whether disfluencies are best explained by grammatical word class, utterance position, or their interaction and whether these features predict group outcomes over time. Our findings offer new insight into how fluency breaks down, and which linguistic profiles may signal persistent stuttering.
Date: May 2 Time: 9:00am-11:00am Location: H.J. Patterson 2124	Speaker: Doctoral Program in Clinical Audiology Description: Capstone Research Day
Date: May 9 Time: 1:00pm Location: Morrill 1101	Age-related temporal processing deficits: The relationship between gap detection and temporal cue discrimination Speaker: Vanessa Reyes Description: Honors Thesis Defense Abstract: Temporal processing abilities are crucial for encoding auditory information. These abilities decline with age, particularly impacting the ability to perceive brief temporal cues. Furthermore, age-related temporal processing deficits appear to be particularly detrimental for speech processing with degraded auditory input, such as that experienced by cochlear-implant users. The goal of this study was to investigate how aging affects performance on different auditory temporal processing tasks in individuals with normal hearing presented simulated electric hearing. First, we hypothesized that reducing spectral information and increasing temporal complexity in a sound would negatively impact temporal processing, with older listeners showing greater deficits. The listeners completed a gap detection task with four stimuli varying in temporal complexity and spectral information. Gap detection thresholds were influenced by both spectral and temporal characteristics of the stimuli, as well as by the listeners’ age although no significant interaction between condition and age group were observed. Second, we hypothesized that reducing spectral information would affect listeners’ ability to discriminate between temporal speech cues, with older listeners showing more difficulty. Listeners completed a temporal cue discrimination task where they identified differences in silent interval durations using the word pair “dish” and “ditch” presented on a 7-step continuum, ranging from 0-60 ms of silence. Stimuli were presented in both unprocessed and vocoded conditions. Slope values for the vocoded stimuli were shallower compared to unprocessed speech, demonstrating that reduced spectral information made the task more difficult and increased reliance on temporal cues. In addition, no significant effect of age group across conditions were observed, suggesting that age did not impact performance on the temporal cue categorization task. Finally, we hypothesized that the individual variability in speech discrimination performance would correlate with gap detection thresholds. No significant correlations were found between performance on gap detection and temporal cue discrimination tasks, suggesting that these tasks may rely on different auditory, linguistic, or cognitive mechanisms. Overall, these findings highlight the importance of temporal processing for understanding speech with degraded spectral input and raises important considerations for older cochlear-implant users. Addressing temporal processing deficits through improvements in device programming may help audiologists enhance speech perception and listening experiences for individuals with cochlear implants.
Date: May 16th Time: 2:00pm Location: H.J. Patterson 2123	Parent-Child Neural Dynamics during a Stressful Task: Probing Associations with Temperament and Anxiety Speaker: Joscelin Rocha-Hidalgo Abstract: Parent-child interactions are central to children’s socioemotional development, and growing evidence suggests these dynamic exchanges may shape anxiety risk in ways that extend beyond shared genetics. While behavioral synchrony has long been studied, less is known about how brain-to-brain coupling—neural synchrony—might serve as a biological mechanism linking parent-child interaction patterns to child outcomes. In this talk, I present data from 109 parent-child dyads (children aged 4–8) who participated in a mildly stressful observational task (DB-DOS: BioSync), while we recorded neural activity using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). I’ll share how synchrony between parent and child prefrontal regions shifted across baseline, stress, and recovery contexts, and how these patterns were moderated by child temperament.