Kelly Miles

Macquarie University · Department of Linguistics

During conversations people coordinate simultaneous channels of verbal and nonverbal information to hear and be heard. But the presence of background noise levels such as those found in cafes and restaurants can be a barrier to conversational success. Here, we used speech and motion-tracking to reveal the reciprocal processes people use to communic...

Understanding speech in background noise presents a significant challenge to listeners with hearing loss. Even though hearing aids are very successful in restoring listening in quieter conditions, current devices provide only limited benefit in noise. While seeing a talker can improve intelligibility, visual benefit has typically been quantified us...

Difficulty communicating is the most challenging consequence of living with hearing loss, substantially affecting personal and professional relationships. While hearing devices help to redress this challenge, there is often a mismatch between performance measures obtained in clinical and laboratory settings and observed real-world behaviour. This d...

Listening is the primary gateway for children to learn in the mainstream classroom, but the dynamics and noise of modern classrooms can make listening challenging. This is especially true for children with hearing loss, language and communication difficulties, attention deficits, autism, other learning needs, and/or those communicating in a languag...

Introduction Listening is the gateway to children learning in the mainstream classroom. However, modern classrooms are noisy and dynamic environments making listening challenging. It is therefore critical for researchers from speech and hearing, education, and health sciences to co-design and collaborate to realistically assess how children listen...

A child's ability to comprehend speech in the mainstream classroom is vital for intellectual and social development. However, listening conditions are often sub-optimal; the presence of multiple talkers, high noise levels, and long reverberation times add to the challenge of listening with a developing auditory system. An assessment that captures t...

During conversations people effortlessly coordinate simultaneous channels of verbal and nonverbal information to hear and be heard. But the presence of common background noise levels such as those found in cafes and restaurants can be a barrier to conversational success. Here, we used speech and motion-tracking to reveal the behavioral processes th...

Laboratory and clinical-based assessments of speech intelligibility must evolve to better predict real-world speech intelligibility. One way of approaching this goal is to develop speech intelligibility tasks that are more representative of everyday speech communication outside the laboratory. Here, we evaluate speech intelligibility using both a s...

Everyday environments impose acoustical conditions on speech communication that require interlocutors to adapt their behavior to be able to hear and to be heard. Past research has focused mainly on the adaptation of speech level, while few studies investigated how interlocutors adapt their conversational distance as a function of noise level. Simil...

To capture the demands of real-world listening, laboratory-based speech-in-noise tasks must better reflect the types of speech and environments listeners encounter in everyday life. This article reports the development of original sentence materials that were produced spontaneously with varying vocal efforts. These sentences were extracted from con...

Recent research has suggested that some long vowels exhibit a constraint on voiceless coda induced shortening in Australian English. This constraint has the potential to compromise the vowel length cue to coda voicing, raising questions about how the coda stop voicing contrast is preserved if vowel duration cues are weakened. One possibility is tha...

Listening to speech in noise is effortful, particularly for people with hearing impairment. While it is known that effort is related to a complex interplay between bottom-up and top-down processes, the cognitive and neurophysiological mechanisms contributing to effortful listening remain unknown. Therefore, a reliable physiological measure to asses...

Listening to degraded speech can be challenging and requires a continuous investment of cognitive resources, which is more challenging for those with hearing loss. However, while alpha power (8-12 Hz) and pupil dilation have been suggested as objective correlates of listening effort, it is not clear whether they assess the same cognitive processes...

English has a word-minimality requirement that all open-class lexical items must contain at least two moras of structure, forming a bimoraic foot (Hayes, 1995).Thus, a word with either a long vowel, or a short vowel and a coda consonant, satisfies this requirement. This raises the question of when and how young children might learn this language-sp...

Young children’s first attempts at CVC words are often realized with the final consonant being heavily aspirated or followed by an epenthetic vowel (e.g., cat /kæt/ realized as [kæth] or [kætə]). This has led some to propose that young children represent word-final (coda) consonants as an onset-nucleus sequence CV.Cv) (e.g., Goad & Brannen, 2003),...

Children with hearing loss often have problems producing adult-like consonants. However, most studies of their speech are based on perceptual transcriptions. This study acoustically examined the speech of a 5-year-old child with bilateral severe hearing loss who uses hearing aids. The aim was to explore whether there were any systematic errors in t...