By: Muthaira Abid, Akshara Rajeshkannan, Christine Seo
Major and Minor: I majored in Speech Sciences and minored in psychology
From: Originally from Victoria, BC but I’ve been living in Vancouver for the past 5 years since having joined UBC
Pronouns: She/her
Tell us one fun fact about yourself?
My go to answer for this question is that at one point, I was able to play five instruments – the flute, the violin, the clarinet, the piano and a little bit of the guitar!
Questions about the start of their research – Akshara
In the speech sciences, what form did your research project take? Was it a personal initiative with a professor or through a program?
I’ve always been interested in working with kids in general. I applied through the URO (Undergraduate Research Opportunities) at the end of my third year. At the lab, the research coordinator and research manager ask you about your research interests and match you with projects they think you’d be interested in. Dr. AJ Orena was a new postdoc at the time when I started volunteering in the lab. His work has to do with voice/word recognition in children with cochlear implants, which is related to speech science and audiology, so I was very fortunate to have been assigned to his project. The research is in collaboration with BC Children’s Hospital. I worked on the project for about a year and then because of COVID, we had to stop data collection in person at the Cochlear Implant Clinic at BCCH. As the lab adapted its studies online, I thought it would be a unique experience to do a directed studies to adapt that original project I was working on to be conducted online. Ultimately, seeking out the lab that aligned with my research interests was my own initiative, but once I was in, they were the ones that paired me with the project.
Could you give us a short overview of your research project? Starting off with your research topic?
The project is looking at the effects of hearing experience on early voice, sound, and word recognition of children with cochlear implants. A cochlear implant is an electronic device that is surgically implanted into the ear of someone who has severe to profound *sensorineural hearing loss. It bypasses the damaged *cochlea and stimulates the *auditory nerve directly using electrical impulses. However, cochlear implants do not restore normal hearing – it simply provides the user with a useful representation of the sounds in the environment to help them understand speech and restore sensitivity within the speech range.
In terms of efficient speech processing, you need to be tracking both the linguistic information (what is being said) and talker information (who is speaking). Talker information, or what we call “indexical information” are properties of speech that are specific to the speaker and provide valuable information into who is speaking (the speaker’s identity) — this includes things like age, gender, regional background, or emotional state. These properties manifest themselves acoustically in measures like pitch and overall speaking rate.
Typically, those who do not have any hearing difficulties are very proficient at processing this indexical information and are able to accurately identify unfamiliar talkers’ age, gender, regional background without much thought. The ability to recognize and distinguish between both familiar and unfamiliar voices, as you can imagine, is an important part of human communication as it allows us to differentiate between familiar and unfamiliar *interlocutors and helps us to track who is speaking during conversations, especially when visual cues are not available to us. Cochlear implants are of specific interest to us in terms of speech processing because it outputs a signal with degraded quality that masks all sorts of important cues for identifying voices, like pitch. This makes processing indexical information more difficult.
Our original project looks at investigating the developmental trajectory of voice recognition in children and comparing normal hearing children with children who use cochlear implants. Much of the research in voice recognition has been done on adults or older children, and so there is a knowledge gap in how younger, specifically prelingually deaf, children do in these tasks.
We have two main objectives for our study. First, we want to examine the voice recognition abilities of children with cochlear implants, as currently there is little known about how young children with cochlear implants learn to process indexical information. A secondary goal is to describe the feasibility of conducting online research on children with cochlear implants. We designed two child-friendly tasks to be conducted via Zoom to test the voice and sound recognition abilities of children. In the first task, we are using a preferential looking paradigm. Children see two cartoon faces (male adult or female adult) on either side of their screen and hear one of the characters produce a sentence. Then, a fern leaf comes down and covers the characters’ mouths, and either the same speaker or a different speaker produces another sentence. Children will respond by looking at who they think are talking. In the second task, we are playing different sounds to children, a voice talking, other nonlinguistic sounds (like a cough or a sneeze) and environmental sounds (like a siren), and asking the children to categorize and identify the sound. We hypothesize that children with cochlear implants will have difficulty with recognizing unfamiliar voices, as processing talker information is difficult for this population. For the sound recognition/categorization task, we predict that children with cochlear implants will have difficulty identifying and discriminating environmental sounds, however there is some evidence to suggest that normal hearing children and children with cochlear implants categorize sounds very similarly, so that will be interesting to see once we have all the results!
* sensorineural hearing loss: loss of hearing as a result of a damaged cochlea
* cochlea: the organ in the ear that transform sound waves into electrical signals that the brain can understand
* auditory nerve: the nerve that carries sound information (in the form of electrical information produced by the cochlea) to the brain
* interlocutor: an individual participating in a conversation
What sparked your interest in your research topic and how did you build your hypothesis?
We built our hypothesis using relevant literature. While I was assigned this project, it’s definitely an area that I am interested in as I’m hoping to be a Speech Language Pathologist in the future and may work with kids and/or adults who have cochlear implants. Having an understanding of how the device works and its limitations, as well as the developmental trajectories of important things like voice recognition would definitely be helpful in practice. I also think this research has the potential to make a really big impact, and that makes me more interested in it.
Was there anyone who inspired you to look into this topic?
I have admired Dr. Janet Werker’s work since the first year of my undergrad. So just having the chance to be mentored by her and work under her was a huge privilege.
Mid-research -Muthaira
What was your favourite part of the process?
I think my favorite part so far has just been being valued on the team. It is not everyday that someone like me, who is an undergrad student is able to have autonomy and influence over decisions made on a project like this. As a research assistant, I have been part of the process of redesigning the project to adapt to the COVID 19 pandemic changes and actually developing the stimuli, such as the videos that the children watch during the preferential looking voice recognition task. When I was working in the lab before being more involved and hands on in the project, the tasks are more administrative in nature, like data entry or coding looking behaviours, and when running the studies, usually, as a research assistant, the stimuli are already prepared and you don’t give it a second thought! While doing the directed studies project, I had to figure out different ways to conduct research online and brainstorm different games that the children could play to motivate them. I had to be super creative, and it was an overall cool experience where I picked up a skill that I can transfer to my future endeavours if I want to work with kids within speech therapy. It has been super rewarding and even though I had to conduct everything online it was a blessing because I learned so much and got to ask research questions that I would not have been able to if I was just in the lab.
I can imagine how much work it takes to conduct a directed studies project – what is one thing that was hard about it and how did you manage to overcome it?
When starting out the project, it was quite a long process to get the ethics approval as well as make sure that everything was in order. It took about two-three months and there was a lot of back and forth. However, it was a requirement and it was a side to developmental research that I never really got to see. Also just the trial and error that comes with research – we came up with really cool ideas like using remote control on Zoom which sounded really amazing in theory but never worked out. I got to be super creative and had to exercise my critical thinking skills. It was definitely hard to not be frustrated when we felt like we were stuck! But once everything got settled and we piloted the study, it felt really good and I got to see the fruits of my labour and see the smiles on parents’ and children’s faces as they participated in the study.
What was it like conducting research during a pandemic?
As of now, we have only gotten started with the data collection part and running participants so I feel like I would be able to answer that a little bit better in a couple of months. If there was no pandemic, I would be interacting with the family in person and filling in questionnaires with the parents. But right now, I am running the show with the children online during the research session and there are a lot more different interactions. I think that overall the experience so far has been really great and I feel really supported by my supervisors. The silver lining with COVID I think is that it increases the accessibility and opportunity for parents to be able to participate in our research within the comfort of their own home, and it also gives our research team a chance to ask really cool questions that we wouldn’t have been able to if things were still how they were pre-pandemic. For example, at the lab usually all the studies are conducted in sound attenuated rooms. In our Zoom study however, we won’t be able to do that, but it’ll be cool to see how children perform in the tasks in a more naturalistic environment that is more reminiscent of their everyday experience.
Seeing how children react to the games and the excitement they have is very delightful and is like a good break during my day.
If they have managed to find conclusions already – Akshara
Is there anything you can share with us about the results that you found? What trends/conclusions did you observe?
For now, we don’t have any solid results as we are still in the middle of data collection and have not coded or analyzed it yet. Literature reveals that it might be pretty easy for normal hearing children to do these voice and sound recognition tasks, and difficult for children with cochlear implants. We had some preliminary results with the in person project, however we used different unfamiliar and familiar voices and faces with that project, so it’s not super relevant here! I’ll keep you guys updated!
What was the most surprising observation from your study?
There aren’t any surprising findings yet because we haven’t collected much data so far. But I was surprised how little research has been done in this area before. I think it’ll be super cool to contribute to filling this gap in the research literature. Another surprising thing was just how fast we were able to adapt our research to be able to conduct it online! Besides using Zoom, there’s lots of other really cool ways we’re collecting data like using MIT’S Lookit platform.
Have you had the chance to compare your results with other research in this field?
Unfortunately, since there isn’t much research available with younger children, we will be comparing our work with data from studies done with older children (6-15 years old) and perhaps adults.
What will you be doing with your data and conclusion now? How do you plan on presenting it?
I did a poster presentation at LSURC (Language Sciences Undergraduate Research Conference) last year. I was supposed to do one at PURC (Psychology Undergraduate Research Conference) as well, but that was cancelled due to COVID. I will be doing a mini-thesis as part of the directed studies, so we’re looking for more conferences to present our research once we get more data and get a chance to analyze it and form some conclusions. Hopefully this year I’ll be able to do a (virtual) talk!
Future questions – Muthaira
How do you see the results of your study being applied in the real world?
It is important for us as researchers to look into the limitations of the cochlear implant device and what it can do as voice recognition, word recognition and sound recognition are important social skills that contribute to development and socialization. By recognizing someone’s voice and other information about the talker, kids can more easily build relationships with people and learn at school. I think this research has implications in education and accessibility, especially with children who use these devices in school settings, so educators can accommodate their needs so they’re where their peers are at. In terms of speech therapy, this research may also help clinicians come up with different goals to target and work on. I also think this type of research is applicable to manufacturers who are developing the actual cochlear implant device to assess the limitations of it and amend it if necessary.
Other research-related questions – Muthaira
What course(s) do you think were most helpful in gaining background knowledge about your research topic?`
I definitely think that learning the language acquisition classes have been really useful such as LING 209, 222 and 451. I first learned about cochlear implants from those courses and the speakers that were invited to talk to the class at the time. PSYC 315 and 302 are also helpful as we are working with children, so knowing typical developmental milestones is important.
Personal Questions
How has conducting this research helped you grow, both personally and professionally? Akshara
On a professional front, it’s been great conducting research and fueling evidence-based knowledge. I think all students should look into being a part of research at UBC. It’s always been a personal goal of mine to conduct research, and one of the reasons why I chose UBC in the first place was because of the reputation the school has in conducting and producing quality research. Personally, this project has helped me be more comfortable with presenting research, approaching professors and academics in the field and battling that dreaded “imposter syndrome”. It’s also great as I’ve been able to practice summarizing the research so that it’s digestible for everyone, and work on my public speaking skills when presenting the research.
Tell us about how you stay organised and manage your time while doing research. How do you prioritise? How do you motivate yourself? Akshara
It’s been tough to stay motivated because working in a lab environment is a lot easier and feels more natural than doing research from home. To combat that challenge, I try to stay as organised as possible. I used my Google Calendar a lot. I also like writing to-do lists, and it’s been good working with Dr. Orena, because he sets clear deadlines for me and expects me to meet them.
Could you maybe tell us what was the most rewarding aspect about your research journey? Akshara
I like the fact that this project is so collaborative, because I get to work with reputed researchers, as well as interact with a niche population of children and learn from them. I also liked being able to interact with the audiologist on the team, since I haven’t had those connections before or been exposed to audiology all that much. The whole process has opened up a lot of doors for me, and I think that has been the most rewarding part.
How do you network within the Speech Sciences community, and where have you made your most valuable connections?
In the lab, the work is very multidisciplinary, and the research assistants on the team are all from different disciplines – some are speech science majors, others music majors, science majors and psychology majors. It was cool to make connections with my peers at the lab, I recognized a lot of them from class but never really got to interact with them in that setting. This project works in collaboration with the BC Children’s Hospital and so I have also been able to make some connections there with the professionals in the cochlear implant clinic as well as different post-docs and professors who work in this field. Working in this lab has truly expanded my network.
What are your other interests outside of Speech Sciences ? Are you a part of any clubs or teams?
As well as working in this lab I am currently working for the Centre of Brain Health at UBC and support patients who have Parkinson’s Disease and other movement related chronic brain conditions. It has been insightful seeing the differences between clinical and developmental research. Besides that, in my undergrad I was a part of the Student Leadership Conference planning committee in 2019, and I was a Senior Advisor in one of the Collegiums on campus which supports first year commuter students.
What are your professional goals and plans for the future? What do you see yourself doing in 5 years time? 10 years time?
Hopefully, I will get into the Speech Language and Pathology program at UBC in the fall. 5-10 years from now I would love to be a medical SLP working at a hospital – maybe at BC Children’s Hospital supporting children in terms of more medical based therapy and rehabilitation as well as hopefully doing some form of research.