Marita Everhardt will be defending her PhD thesis “Non-native prosody perception in cochlear implant-simulated speech” on 6 April, 16:15.
Beautiful thesis, very proud of this work!
Co-supervised with Dr. Wander Lowie, Dr. Anastasios Sarampalis, and Dr. Matt Coler.

184^th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) is in Chicago (May 8-12, 2023).

We are organizing a special session,  “Perception beyond tones and speech in normal and impaired hearing: Voice, emotions, and music perception.” This session will be co-sponsored by the Psychological & Physiological Acoustics (P&P) and the Speech Communication (SC) Technical Committees. We are excited for the opportunity to bring together wonderful speakers from around the world to present current work on these topics, emphasizing the importance of studying hearing impairment from a broader perspective.

Co-organized by Deniz Başkent, Tyler Perrachione,  and Gin Best.

Link:
https://acousticalsociety.org/chicago-2023/

Emotion recognition is important for development and speech communication but we still know little about it for children with hearing loss. Do you want to know more?

Dr. Laura Rachman from Pento Audiologisch Centrum Zwolle and affiliated with our lab will be giving a talk at Congres Partners in Verstaan 2023 on emotion recognition in children with hearing loss.

The talk is in the parallel session 2, 21 April 223.

Link: https://congres.partnersinverstaan.nl/

How do children with hearing aids deal with understanding speech with other interfering speech in the background? And children with cochlear implants?

Deniz will be presenting our recent results with both groups of children at the upcoming ARO Midwinter Meeting, in February 2023, in Florida. The results are eye opening. In short, while the overall picture is optimistic, not all children do well to the same degree, and some have great difficulties. In cochlear-implanted children, some children perform better than implanted adults. So, we have so many more questions to follow up!

Research with children in general, but with hearing loss in particular, is challenging. All tests need to be modified to fit the attention span of children, and with all the other obligations, such as school, hobbies, clinical visits, they are already full in their agenda’s and at times very tired. Perhaps as a result of this, relevant literature seems limited. On the other hand, this research is also very rewarding. The hearing devices often work differently for children than adults. While research with adults is very valuable, we also need to know these differences to better serve the needs of children. And for this, we need to continue providing this kind of research-based evidence.

The data Deniz will be presenting is a result of a number of projects conducted over many years, where we first had to find out the right tests, and then the right interfaces, and then work around children’s and their parents’ very busy schedules, and then also combine our expertise from many different fields. Many researchers spent hours on the road to visit the children at their homes or schools, to not disrupt their daily lives.

Every single data point is a valuable one from hours and hours of efforts from participants, parents, researchers, and sometimes even teachers. We are grateful to all. We also appreciate funding from many resources for this project of similar children’s projects (NWO (Dutch Research Council), ZonMw, Sonova Group, Phonak, UMCG, University of Groningen) and we hope to be able to continue this important work, especially now that we have the right tools and expertise.

The co-authors and many more who had contributed to this research in earlier stages:
Laura Rachman, Leanne Nagels,  Petra Hendriks, Debi Vickers, Etienne Gaudrain. Gonca Sennaroğlu, Gizem Babaoğlu, Pınar Ertürk, Basak Ozkisi Yazgan, Bert Maat, Rolien Free, Iris van Bommel, Evelien Birza, Jop Luberti, Paolo Toffanin, Jacqueline Libert, Jemima Phillpot.

Deniz gave a lecture at the Scientific Symposium organised by the Student Organisation G.F.S.V. Pharmaciae Sacrum, coinciding with the 141st anniversary of the organisation. The topic was MeloDIES in Audiology.

Deniz talked about our music training project where we use a newly developed method of piano learning (developed by Robert Harris and PI Ellie Harding), where we teach the method to the piano teachers and they teach it to users of cochlear implants. We only have data now to see if this training can provide measurable benefits, but regardless, already it is a great reward to see how this method works and our participants can enjoy playing music.

Also kudos to the students at the event. All the questions were excellent, each on an important research topic either we are busy with or we should be busy with. Such interactions are so inspirational, and the thank you gift is just the cream of the cake.

Thanking the organisers once more for this invitation, and all of our collaborators (Rolien Free, Bert Maat, Barbara Tillmann, Etienne Gaudrain) and funding (Dorhout Mees Stichting, NWO – Dutch Research Council.

Ellie Harding and Deniz Baskent gave a talk in “Music and Science” session, organised by HTRIC, at the MXT Conference 2023 at ESNS.

We presented our work inspired by musicians, and aimed for improving music and overall listening experience with cochlear implants. We received great feedback and questions from the audience, and even one from Tom Holkenborg (aka Junkie XL), which may inspire us for a new project.