Overview
Hearing Research at NTU undertake research into the psychological, biological and computational basis of hearing, and hearing impairment.
Nine million people in the UK are classified as deaf or hard of hearing. The principal cause of this is damage to the delicate inner ear. Current hearing aids and cochlear implants partly restore our ability to hear. However, they perform poorly when aiding understanding of speech in more challenging circumstances. Understanding speech in noisy environments is a complex task for all of us, and its mechanisms are poorly understood; it involves interplay between the ears and multiple processing centres of the brain.
Our group studies how we perceive and process sound, and how this is affected by factors such as hearing impairment, cognition, age, cochlear implants, and other sensory information. By improving understanding of communication pathways between the ear and the brain, and the factors affecting these pathways, we aim to provide improved strategies for identifying risk factors that lead to reduced hearing and improve diagnosis and treatment strategies for hearing impairment and its related conditions.
Highlighted Publications
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Publications
BLACKBURN, C.L., KITTERICK, P.T., JONES, G., SUMNER, C.J. and STACEY, P.C., 2019. Visual speech benefit in clear and degraded speech depends on the auditory intelligibility of the talker and the number of background talkers. Trends in Hearing, 23. ISSN 2331-2165
ROBERTS, K.L., DOHERTY, N.J., MAYLOR, E.A. and WATSON, D.G., 2019. Can auditory objects be subitized? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 45 (1), pp. 1-15. ISSN 0096-1523
ROBERTS, K.L. and ALLEN, H.A., 2016. Perception and cognition in the ageing brain: a brief review of the short- and long-term links between perceptual and cognitive decline. Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, 8. ISSN 1663-4365
STACEY, P.C., KITTERICK, P.T., MORRIS, S.D. and SUMNER, C.J., 2016. The contribution of visual information to the perception of speech in noise with and without informative temporal fine structure. Hearing Research, 336, pp. 17-28. ISSN 0378-5955
STEADMAN, M.A. and SUMNER, C.J., 2018. Changes in neuronal representations of consonants in the ascending auditory system and their role in speech recognition. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 12: 671. ISSN 1662-453X
SUMNER, C.J., WELLS, T.T., BERGEVIN, C., SOLLINI, J., KREFT, H.A., PALMER, A.R., OXENHAM, A.J. and SHERA, C.A., 2018. Mammalian behavior and physiology converge to confirm sharper cochlear tuning in humans. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115 (44), pp. 11322-11326. ISSN 0027-8424
VANHEUSDEN, F.J., CHESNAYE, M.A., SIMPSON, D.M. and BELL, S.L., 2019. Envelope frequency following responses are stronger for high-pass than low-pass filtered vowels. International Journal of Audiology. ISSN 1499-2027
VANHEUSDEN, F.J., BELL, S.L., CHESNAYE, M.A. and SIMPSON, D.M., 2018. Improved detection of vowel envelope frequency following responses using Hotelling’s T2 analysis. Ear and Hearing: the Official Journal of the American Auditory Society. ISSN 0196-0202
Related Staff
The following staff are involved in the work of Hearing Research at NTU:
Core Staff:
Dr Chris Sumner
Dr Paula Stacey
Dr Fred VanHeusden
Dr Catherine Blackburn
Associated Staff:
Dr Natalie Braber
Dr Ahmet Omurtag
Dr Darren Rhodes
Dr Kate Roberts
Dr Harriet Smith
Dr David Wright
PhD Students:
Jammie Stacey
Samuel Smith
Collaboration
The Hearing Research group works with the following institutions:
University of Nottingham
Kings College London
University of Cambridge
Purdue University, USA
Imperial College London
University of Manchester
University of Leicester
University of Southampton
Technical University of Denmark
