Introduction to the Research Symposium Forum

Purpose

The purpose of this introduction is to provide an overview of the articles contained within this research forum of JSLHR. Each of these articles is based upon presentations from the 2016 ASHA Research Symposium.

This research forum contains papers from the 2016 Research Symposium at the ASHA Convention held in Philadelphia, PA.

The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) has been offering a research symposium at its annual convention since 1990. The purpose of this symposium, which is funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, is to bring together researchers, clinicians, and students to learn about recent developments in a focused area. The theme of the 2016 Research Symposium was “Advances in Auditory Attention Research: Processing Complex Auditory Stimuli.” I was fortunate to be asked to organize this program.

My goal in selecting the speakers for this symposium was to choose people who were conducting research on various aspects of this broad topic and who could relay their expertise in a manner that would be clear and compelling to the range of audience members. I am excited that information from these excellent talks will now be more widely distributed as the articles published in this issue of the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research (JSLHR).

The articles in this research forum are broadly grouped into three areas. Barbara Shinn-Cunningham and Elyse Sussman lay the groundwork by discussing theoretical and neurological underpinnings of attention, especially as this applies to listening in noisy and complex situations. Both of these articles describe how the effects of attention can be measured in humans using electrophysiological techniques. Dr. Sussman's (2017) article details a model that proposes how attention influences auditory scene analysis in noisy situations. She summarizes research, conducted primarily using event-related potentials, supporting the idea that unattended information is available to the listener, concluding with the elegant analogy of individuals being able to distinguish and listen to different instruments during an orchestral performance.

Dr. Shinn-Cunningham's (2017) contribution provides an overview of why people with normal audiograms may still have problems understanding speech in complex listening situations that contain competing talkers. She suggests that the marked individual variability noted from listeners in these situations (even those with normal hearing) is likely due at least in part to differences in cortically controlled selective attention. She also makes a case for cochlear synaptopathy (i.e., “hidden hearing loss”) as a contributor to these problems.

The second set of articles (one from Lori J. Leibold and the other from my lab) provides information about developmental aspects of listening in complex auditory environments with multiple talkers. Dr. Leibold's (2017) contribution highlights the importance of studying how this ability changes during childhood. She summarizes results suggesting that young children have an inordinate difficulty in the presence of a small number of competing talkers. One clear message from the information presented in this article is that auditory experience helps to overcome speech-on-speech masking (more so than is the case when nonspeech noise is the masker) for both children with normal hearing and for children with hearing loss. A common theme appears in this work with children as well as in the article from our lab, which summarizes results of competing speech studies in younger, middle-aged, and older adults. Both of these articles suggest that speech recognition in noise and in competing speech seem to be mediated by different underlying mechanisms. In Dr. Leibold's work, this is seen as a lack of correlation between these two measures in children. As the article from our lab (Helfer, Merchant, & Wasiuk, 2017) describes, middle-aged adults perform similarly to younger adults in the presence of noise maskers but have much more difficulty when the masker is composed of one or two understandable talkers. Besides the theoretical implications for this differentiation, this points to the limitations of clinical tests that assess speech understanding in steady-state noise or multitalker babble, which may tell us little about how our patients function in many realistic listening situations. The article from our lab details our finding that middle-aged adults often report as much (or nearly as much) hearing difficulty as older adults on self-reported measures of auditory performance outside of the lab, even though older individuals typically have substantially more peripheral hearing loss. This reinforces the importance of including measures of self-reported hearing ability during routine audiologic assessment.

The final two articles in this research forum are focused on current and future technology that has the potential to improve the ability of people with hearing loss to cope in adverse listening situations. In the first of these contributions, Michael Dorman and Rene H. Gifford (2017) provide a summary of how different configurations of listening using cochlear implants (CIs; e.g., bilateral CIs, or listening bimodally with a CI in one ear and a hearing aid in the other ear) and different technologies used with CIs (e.g., beamforming, remote microphones) affect speech understanding in complex environments. Their results suggest that these innovations hold great promise for improving auditory performance for people who use CIs. The article by Gerald Kidd (2017) also discusses cutting-edge technology. His contribution describes the current status of a “visually guided hearing aid” (VGHA) that uses beamforming controlled by eye gaze. This article also provides an overview of the concept of and evidence for humans using a “spatial filter” or “spotlight” in competing speech situations to focus attention on a particular talker and details the challenges of this spotlight in real-life dynamic situations where the talker of interest changes during group conversation.

I hope that these thought-provoking articles spark interest in both researchers and clinicians—in researchers, to continue to study the factors that influence the ability to cope in complex listening situations, and in clinicians who diagnose and treat individuals who experience problems in these situations on a daily basis.

Funding Statement

The Research Symposium is supported by the National Institute On Deafness and Other Communication Disorders of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R13DC003383.