SARAH HARGUS FERGUSON

My research is focused on talker factors that affect listeners’ speech understanding as well as their perception of talker characteristics. Examples of talker factors include speaking style (especially clear speech, which talkers adopt when talking to someone with hearing loss), foreign accent, and dialect. Lab activities include acoustic analyses of speech as well as perceptual experiments in which listeners with normal hearing or hearing loss either identify what a talker said, rate the clarity of the speech, or make judgments about the talker’s age, gender, or emotional state.