Hearing loss
Hearing
Dr Mengfan Wu is examining how listening strategies are affected by hearing loss, hearing aid use, and training interventions.
Studies show that people with hearing loss tend to have different listening strategies compared with normal-hearing people when trying to understand conversations in noisy situations.
As hearing impairment causes damage in the auditory system, daily conversation tends to sound different or distorted for people with hearing loss and they are likely to develop specific strategies to detect various speech sounds.
Moreover, hearing-aids can often cause distortion of sound in noisy situations. Therefore, hearing-aid users are likely to go through another adaptation process to get used to the ‘new’ sound introduced by hearing aids.
Dr Mengfan Wu from the University of Nottingham wants to better understand the individual differences in listening strategies and these strategies might change due to hearing loss, hearing-aid use, and interventions.
Dr Wu and her team aim to study whether differences in listening strategies might help explain the individual differences in self-reported hearing and speech-understanding abilities. This project will help further understand the impact of hearing loss and treatment in various layers of auditory processing.