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NEURAL DYNAMICS UNDERLYING SPEECH PROCESSING IN CHILDREN WITH UNILATERAL HEARING LOSS

Award Number: K01DC023235
ORGANIZATION: NATIONAL INSTITUTE ON DEAFNESS AND OTHER COMMUNICATION DISORDERS
OPDIV: NIH
AWARD CLASS: DISCRETIONARY
AWARD ACTIVITY TYPE: TRAINING/TRAINEESHIP
PERIOD OF PERFORMANCE START DATE: 07/10/2026
PERIOD OF PERFORMANCE END DATE: 06/30/2029

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NEURAL DYNAMICS UNDERLYING SPEECH PROCESSING IN CHILDREN WITH UNILATERAL HEARING LOSS - PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Unilateral hearing loss (UHL) affects over 3 million school-age children in the United States. Children with UHL (CUHL) are at significant risk for delayed or disordered auditory, cognitive, speech, and language development, resulting in poor academic performance and quality of life. Currently, there is a distinct lack of empirical evidence to guide rehabilitation for CUHL, leading to a costly, failure-based model of intervention with limited efficacy. This underscores a critical, unmet healthcare need. Prior work has largely attributed the developmental difficulties of CUHL to poorer speech perception resulting from spatial (i.e., binaural) hearing deficits. Emerging evidence suggests this is an incomplete account of the speech perception challenges of CUHL. Even when CUHL have speech presented to their unaffected, normal-hearing ear or utilize a hearing aid, speech perception challenges persist. The research described in this K01 proposal tests the hypothesis that CUHL show experience-dependent alterations in the neural representation of phonological information even when stimuli are presented to their normal-hearing ear. The core premise is that consistent, quality input from both ears is critical in development to ensure robust neural representations of phonemes. To test our innovative premise, we leverage world-class resources and cutting-edge multimodal neuroimaging technology to—for the first time—characterize behavioral speech perception in the normal-hearing ear of CUHL (Aim 1) and examine the neural dynamics of speech perception in the normal-hearing ear of CUHL using magnetoencephalography (Aim 2). The goal of this K01 career development award is to directly advance the PI’s short-term career development goal of combining cutting-edge neurophysiological and behavioral methodology to comprehensively characterize speech perception in CUHL. Our specific objective in this K01 is to address the current gaps in the PI’s knowledge and skills in applied cognitive neuroscience, factors related to individual differences in academic, auditory, and language outcomes in hard-of-hearing children, and advanced statistical modeling. The expected outcome of the proposed career development award is advancement of the PI’s long-term career goal of becoming a productive, independent investigator whose program of research advances evidence-informed approaches to the management of pediatric unilateral hearing loss. Completion of this novel proposal will also shift the current spatial-hearing centric approach of studying CUHL to a more comprehensive, holistic focus that could provide crucial insights into acoustics, speech, and language abilities involved in spoken language processing. This research falls under NIDCD Research Priority Area 2: Understanding Diseases and Disorders, Changes in Perception with Disease.


Issue Date FY	Funding FY	Legal Entity Name	Legal Entity Address	Legal Entity City	Legal Entity State	Legal Entity Zip Code	Legal Entity COUNTY	Legal Entity COUNTRY	Assistance Listing	Award Code	Budget Year	Action Date	Action Type	Action Amount

Issue Date FY: 2026 ( Subtotal = $134,495 )
2026	2026	FATHER FLANAGAN'S BOYS' HOME	14100 CRAWFORD ST	BOYS TOWN	NE	68010	DOUGLAS	USA	Research Related to Deafness and Communication Disorders	000	1	7/10/2026	NEW	$134,495
														Subtotal = $134,495

Grand Total All Awards = $134,495

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NEURAL DYNAMICS UNDERLYING SPEECH PROCESSING IN CHILDREN WITH UNILATERAL HEARING LOSS

Award Number: K01DC023235

ORGANIZATION: NATIONAL INSTITUTE ON DEAFNESS AND OTHER COMMUNICATION DISORDERS

OPDIV: NIH

AWARD CLASS: DISCRETIONARY

AWARD ACTIVITY TYPE: TRAINING/TRAINEESHIP

PERIOD OF PERFORMANCE START DATE: 07/10/2026

PERIOD OF PERFORMANCE END DATE: 06/30/2029

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