![\"Assistant](\"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/Ganek1-copy-1050x700.jpg\")
Assistant Professor Hillary Ganek is eager to make speech pathology interventions more adaptable to the needs of people with hearing loss in developing countries.<\/p><\/div>\n
\u201cIt turns out that hearing aids have the capability to collect similar data about the type of auditory environment a person is in,\u201d she says. \u201cIn 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe 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,\u201d says Ganek.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs we listened to the first few hours of the recording, we were tweaking our dictionary,\u201d says Zamperin. \u201cAt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
The two students compared their findings and found the dictionary could be used with a high level of confidence \u2014 a finding confirmed during the Winter Term when Kitiera Lynch became the first student to use the dictionary after its creation.<\/p>\n
Lynch says what surprised her most about the research practicum was the variety in sound environments different children might experience.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe research process gave me insight into how children\u2019s environments at home can differ,\u201d she says. \u201cSo, 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen Professor Ganek first explained the whole long haul of this research, I was surprised by all the intricacies even right at the start,\u201d she says. \u201cIt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lynch, Cardamone and Zamperin will all begin speech-language pathology master\u2019s programs in September.<\/p>\n
In the meantime, Ganek will continue to collect data and test the dictionary protocol.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe now have a dictionary for labelling the audio recordings, which students have used and will continue to use as I collect more data,\u201d she says. \u201cHopefully, I\u2019ll have more students who are able and interested in helping with this project over the next couple of months.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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\u2019t use sign language at home.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":101760,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1,5,38],"tags":[7948,14571,522,14574,14572,14573,4122],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101755"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101755"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101755\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":101787,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101755\/revisions\/101787"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/101760"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}