Dr. Maria Kondaurova

Congratulations to Dr. Maria Kondaurova for being awarded the Programmatic Support Grant- Spring 2022 in the amount of $3,000 from the Office of Research & Innovation, UofL!

Her project titled “Validating techniques for collecting vocal and listening effort during remote and in-person speech-language intervention” will examine the effect of telepractice on measures of cognitive effort in deaf and hard-of-hearing children during speech-language intervention (see the abstract below).

Abstract

Telepractice is a growing service model that delivers aural rehabilitation services to deaf and hard-of-hearing children at a distance via telecommunications technology. Despite known benefits of telepractice this delivery approach introduces new challenges to the provider-pediatric patient interaction by altering the availability and the quality of the auditory, visual and tactile information. Such challenges may increase a child’s vocal and listening effort, affecting functional outcomes derived from audiological rehabilitation services. Vocal effort is described as an exertion of the voice and perceived effort in producing speech. Listening effort is an allocation of cognitive resources (working memory capacity and attention) towards an auditory task. Increased vocal effort negatively affects an individual’s ability to modify vocal quality in a therapeutic context. Increased listening effort decreases language comprehension and motivation to learn in children with hearing loss. Greater vocal and listening effort are associated with increased stress, tension and fatigue, decreasing treatment efficacy. There is a critical gap in our understanding of the effect of telepractice service modality on the characteristics of deaf and hard-of-hearing children vocal and listening effort. Before we can study this further, work is needed to expand the robustness and utility of our methods with deaf and hard-of-hearing children. The proposed experiments will validate techniques for collecting measures of vocal and listening effort in deaf and hard-of-hearing children during remote and in-person speech-language intervention. These pilot studies will make the future NIH application more competitive by improving the efficiency, accuracy, and robustness of our innovative approaches.