SLA Invited Lecture: Stefanie Kuchinsky
SLA Invited Lecture: Stefanie Kuchinsky
Stefanie Kuchinsky (Ph.D. in Psychology, University of Illinois) is a Research Investigator in the Audiology and Speech Pathology Center at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. She is a faculty affiliate at the University of Maryland, where she previously held a position as a Research Assistant Professor. She uses behavioral, pupillometry, and neuroimaging methods to investigate the sensory and attention systems that support speech understanding. A major focus of her work is on using objective measures of cognitive effort to more comprehensively assess and remediate the challenges that people face during communication in adverse listening conditions.
This Thursday, she will give a talk titled "Measuring and modulating effortful listening: Developing interventions to address diverse listening challenges."
Abstract:
Successful listening involves more than just hearing. While the coordination of the perceptual, linguistic, and cognitive processes that underlie speech recognition often occurs in an automatic fashion, myriad factors may disrupt them leading to effortful listening. In this talk, I will describe my research examining speech perception challenges in both healthy and patient populations (e.g., older adults with and without hearing loss) as well as experiments evaluating interventions that aim to improve speech recognition in one’s native or a foreign language while optimizing listening effort (e.g., training, peripheral nerve stimulation). I conclude by suggesting that varied intervention strategies should be considered for addressing the diverse underlying processes that contribute to effortful listening.
Readings:
Pandža, N. B., Phillips, I., Karuzis, V. P., O’Rourke, P., & Kuchinsky, S. E. (2020). Neurostimulation and Pupillometry: New Directions for Learning and Research in Applied Linguistics. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 40, 56–77.
Kuchinsky, S. E., Ahlstrom, J. B., Vaden, K. I., Cute, S. L., Humes, L. E., Dubno, J. R., & Eckert, M. A. (2013). Pupil size varies with word listening and response selection difficulty in older adults with hearing loss. Psychophysiology, 50, 23–34.
