Welcome to the Child Speech Research Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign! Our research examines how children understand speech in challenging listening environments, with a focus on the developmental, cognitive, and experiential factors that shape this ability. We are especially interested in how age, listening experience, and individual differences contribute to children’s speech recognition in noise.

A central theme of our work is how children make use of talker-related characteristics—such as familiarity, speaking style, or voice quality—to improve speech understanding when background noise or competing talkers are present. Recent projects have explored the effects of talker familiarity, atypical or dysphonic voices, and bilingual listening experience on speech-in-noise recognition and listening effort.

In addition to behavioral measures of accuracy, response time, and self-reported listening effort, we are beginning to incorporate EEG methods to better understand the neural underpinnings of listening effort. This is a newer line of work in our lab, currently in the pilot stage, that we are actively expanding.

We are also committed to advancing access to hearing healthcare and communication supports. Ongoing projects in the lab examine cultural influences on hearing health knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs, with the goal of identifying barriers to care and promoting more equitable access to services for diverse communities.

The long-term goal of our research is to advance knowledge about the mechanisms that support speech understanding in children and to inform strategies that improve communication outcomes for all learners, including those with hearing loss, bilingual backgrounds, or other listening challenges. To find out more please visit our Research page.