As a speech-language pathologist and a certified auditory-verbal therapist, Hillary Ganek strives to understand how children with hearing loss learn to speak outside of a lab or clinic, particularly in families of different cultures or those who don’t use sign language at home.

The Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics often relies on daylong audio recordings for her research, collected using a specialized device worn by a child during a typical day. The devices, however, are expensive and likely out of reach for researchers and clinicians with limited resources.

Now, with the support of a Brock Explore grant and some keen undergraduate researchers, Ganek seeks a more cost-effective alternative for understanding children’s sound environments in the hopes of opening a new door for researchers and speech-language pathologists around the world.

Assistant Professor Hillary Ganek is eager to make speech pathology interventions more adaptable to the needs of people with hearing loss in developing countries.

“It turns out that hearing aids have the capability to collect similar data about the type of auditory environment a person is in,” she says. “In speech therapy, if we know more about what the communication environment looks like, we can provide strategies for a family to teach language in those environments better, so this data can be extremely useful.”

Hearing aids are programmed to adjust microphone settings to different environments in order to be optimized for listening, so data collection is a common feature. But to determine how accurate it is, Ganek needed human ears to compare the sound environment cues recorded by hearing aids with sample daylong audio recordings taken by a child while wearing a hearing aid.

“The students in my research practica listened to daylong audio recordings and labelled them for the different auditory environments to confirm what the hearing aid is actually telling us,” says Ganek.

Fourth-year Speech Language and Hearing Sciences students Elise Cardamone and Grace Zamperin worked to develop a dictionary of sound environments through the Fall Term.

“As we listened to the first few hours of the recording, we were tweaking our dictionary,” says Zamperin. “At our checkpoint meetings, we would compare how we coded the environments separately to see if we could use the dictionary definitions to accurately determine what environments a child was in.”

The two students compared their findings and found the dictionary could be used with a high level of confidence — a finding confirmed during the Winter Term when Kitiera Lynch became the first student to use the dictionary after its creation.

Lynch says what surprised her most about the research practicum was the variety in sound environments different children might experience.

“The research process gave me insight into how children’s environments at home can differ,” she says. “So, if I am working with a family as a speech-language pathologist, I will want to make sure that I provide optimal language input for the short amount of time that I am with them and try to communicate with families and caregivers what optimal language input looks like and how it can benefit children and their language development.”

Cardamone agrees the practicum helped her understand how research drives evidence-based clinical practice, and says she learned a lot from the behind-the-scenes look at how intensive the research process can be.

“When Professor Ganek first explained the whole long haul of this research, I was surprised by all the intricacies even right at the start,” she says. “It really surprised me that it takes this much effort and time, but I loved putting all the time and effort into it; I felt like a part of something.”

Lynch, Cardamone and Zamperin will all begin speech-language pathology master’s programs in September.

In the meantime, Ganek will continue to collect data and test the dictionary protocol.

“We now have a dictionary for labelling the audio recordings, which students have used and will continue to use as I collect more data,” she says. “Hopefully, I’ll have more students who are able and interested in helping with this project over the next couple of months.”