Posted 06/05/2007

COMD researcher Healy receives $1.5 million NIH grant
to continue speech, hearing studies

Arnold School of Public Health researcher Dr. Eric Healy has a new $1.5 million, five-year NIH grant to continue work aimed at better understanding how humans process speech and how hearing problems influence that process. 

There is urgency to his mission because some 25 million Americans already have hearing loss, double the rate 30 years ago, with “a profound influence on social and emotional health,” said Healy. 

“It’s a serious problem,” he said. By the time Americans turn 70, “twenty percent either use a hearing aid or have obvious difficulty hearing speech. You can increase that to 40 percent for people over 80,” he said.  

The first wave of an estimated 80 million Baby Boomers will reach age 70 in just nine years. 

The grant comes from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders which, for the past three years, funded Healy’s research at the Speech Psychoacoustics Laboratory in the Department of Communication Science and Disorders.  

The previous grant resulted in 21 peer-reviewed publications, including six in just the first five months of this year and three currently in press. 

Healy explained that listening to speech is an effortless process that goes unnoticed for most people. The reason for that is because the processing mechanism is so powerful and effective.

Healy’s research is aimed at understanding exactly what constitutes normal hearing so that when something goes wrong, an appropriate treatment can target the problem. 

Healy has assembled a team consisting of consultants and graduate students, and has forged additional collaborations with researchers around the world. 

Healy earned his doctorate in psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where he concentrated on human cognition and perception. He also performed post-doctoral work in psychoacoustics at the Arizona State University-Tempe before joining the USC faculty in 2001.