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Faculty Updates

New Grants

Gavin Bidelman PhD, Associate Professor in the Institute for Intelligent Systems and School of Communication Sciences & Disorders, received a grant from the National Institutes of Health for his project entitled "Neuroimaging biomarkers of speech processing deficits in MCI". The new award supplements Bidelman's two other brain imaging projects funded by the NIH, providing $300K to expand the research and explore whether mild cognitive impairment (MCI), an early stage in progression of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias, impacts the brain's precise neural encoding of speech. Clinical neuropsychologists at the Semmes Murphey Neurological Clinic will collaborate on the project. The work aims to establish a new EEG diagnostic to detect early cognitive decline via subtle changes in hearing function, potentially before the onset of more obvious memory and cognitive deficits. The research is jointly funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) and the National Institute on Aging (NIA). For more information on the Bidelman lab, see https://www.memphis.edu/acnl/

Gavin Bidelman PhD, Co-I (PI: Claude Alain, Rotman Research Inst., Toronto). "The impacts of hearing aid use on auditory cognition: A functional connectivity analysis," William Demant Foundation (Denmark), 8/20–7/23, $166,000 (USD).

Miriam van Mersbergen PhD, Assistant Professor in the School of Communication Sciences & Disorders and an interdisciplinary team from UofM (engineering) and UTHSC (otolaryngology) are recipients of the cross-institutional CORNET grant. Their study entitled "Aerosolization of Emitted Particles in Multiple Breathing, Speech and Singing Activities" will contribute to scientists' understanding of the spread of COVID 19 and help researchers and public health officials determine strategies that will help contain the pandemic.

Publications

Bidelman, G. M., & Yoo, J. (2020). Musicians show improved speech segregation in competitive, multi-talker cocktail party scenarios. Frontiers in Psychology, 11(1927), 1-11.
This is the first published study that utilized data collected in the School's Anechoic Chamber.

Chung, W.-L. & Bidelman, G. M. (in press). Mandarin-speaking preschoolers' pitch discrimination, prosodic and phonological awareness, and their relation to receptive vocabulary and reading abilities. Reading and Writing.

Long, H. L., Bowman, D. D., Yoo, H., Burkhardt-Reed, M. M., Bene, E. R., Oller, D. K. (2020). Social and non-social functions of infant vocalizations. PLoS One. 1-18.

Mahmud, S., Ahmed, F., Al-Fahad, R., Moinuddin, K. A., Yeasin, M., Alain, C., & Bidelman, G. M. (2020). Decoding hearing-related changes in older adults' spatiotemporal neural processing of speech using machine learning. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 14(748), 1-15.

McMillen, S., Jarmulowicz, L., Mackay, M.M., & Oller, D.K. (2020). Rapid shift in naming efficiency on a rapid automatic naming task by young Spanish-speaking English language learners. Applied Psycholinguistics (online).

Myers, M .H., Padmanabha, A., Bidelman, G. M., & Wheless, J. W. (2020). Seizure localization using EEG analytical signals. Clinical Neurophysiology, 131(9), 2131-2139.

Warren, S.E., Dunbar, M.N., Bosworth, C., & Agrawal, S. (2020). Evaluation of a novel bimodal fitting formula in Advanced Bionics cochlear implant recipients. Cochlear implants international, Published online ahead of print.

Presentations

Miriam van Mersbergen PhD, appeared on the Visceral Voice podcast with Christine Schneider to discuss her research on vocal congruence. <8.31.20>