Listening and Language in Children (LiLaC) Lab

Research in the LiLaC Lab focuses on the effects of hearing loss on listening and language skills in school-age children with hearing aids and cochlear implants. The overarching goals of this research are to improve real-world functional outcomes and inform intervention approaches for children with hearing loss. In the LiLaC Lab, we take several approaches to understanding how children with hearing loss process speech, especially under challenging listening conditions. Using eye-tracking technology, we investigate the time course of children’s real-time lexical and semantic activation during spoken word recognition. This allows us to better understand how children with hearing loss utilize specific cognitive processes to understand spoken language. We also use clinical audiologic and language assessments to examine how factors such as auditory access and vocabulary support real-world listening skills. Finally, we are interested in understanding how children’s hearing history and auditory environment influence their ability to effectively learn, process, and understand spoken language. Taken together, our research draws from basic psycholinguistic research methods to address important clinical questions in pediatric audiology.