My research is motivated by my desire to improve older adults’ speech communication in challenging environments. We know having a conversation in noisy environments is a difficult task for many older adults, particularly those with hearing loss. This difficulty limits their participation in social activities, with severe consequences of social isolation, psychological disturbance, and cognitive decline.

While both peripheral hearing and cognitive abilities affect older adults’ speech perception, perceptual cues, such as speech prosody and voice characteristics, can provide substantial benefit and help older adults’ perceive speech better. Within this context, I intend to develop a translational research program to study the roles of perceptual cues in older adults’ speech perception in challenging environments.