By: Kelsey Hatton, AuD, CCC-A, Vice President of Audiology

This year at the Texas Speech-Language-Hearing Association (TSHA) Convention in Fort Worth, there were great opportunities to learn about what is new, now, and next for audiology and speech-language pathology research. There were more posters than ever before, so we wanted to recap and applaud the research our student members contributed within audiology.

This year’s poster walk included nine posters with a focus on audiology topics, and eight of these were presented by student attendees. These posters represented four different universities within Texas and a diversity of projects at PhD, AuD, and undergraduate levels. On Friday afternoon, we held our fifth Audiology Student Research Symposium. While the format of the event has evolved from year to year, we have steadily increased participation and opportunity for students at Convention. Our audiology clinicians and instructors serve as judges, identify the top entries, and assign awards from $100 to $300 to recognize outstanding student work. We will continue with this session in 2027 because it’s a great way to platform the ideas and interests of trainees and hear about the newest ideas in our fields.

This year, we awarded $650 in prizes for our top four Symposium entries. We celebrated with the students and continued discussing their projects during our Audiology Social immediately following the Symposium, a tradition we plan on continuing when we meet in Dallas next year. The Audiology Programming Committee is proud to share a summary of the 2026 posters below and give our readers insight into the kinds of projects our student members with audiology projects can submit.

• Sean Kashiwagura presented “Auditory Brainstem Correlates of Hyperacusis in Young Adults with Clinically Normal Hearing,” advised by Dr. Kelly Jahn. He worked with 44 young adults with normal hearing sensitivity presenting with a range of hyperacusis severities. Auditory Brainstem Response (ABR) and Frequency Following Response (FFR) measures were evaluated, and there was a significant negative relationship between the severity of hyperacusis and ABR wave V amplitude as well as ABR wave V/III amplitude ratio. He is interested in continuing to evaluate central auditory gain mechanisms in this patient population. Sean was awarded a prize in the Symposium.
• Swarali Joshi presented “Hyperacusis Is Associated with Listening Fatigue and Hearing Difficulties in Autistic and Non-Autistic Adults,” advised by Dr. Kelly Jahn. She worked with 55 participants with normal hearing sensitivity to evaluate their hyperacusis severity, listening fatigue, self-reported autism traits, and speech/spatial qualities of hearing. There were three significant positive relationships found between hyperacusis severity and higher autism traits, hyperacusis severity and listening fatigue, and finally hyperacusis severity and speech/spatial qualities of hearing. Their lab will continue to investigate listening differences experienced by individuals with hyperacusis. Swarali was awarded a prize in the Symposium.
• Saranya Mundayoor presented “The Effect of Talker Variability on Speech Perception in Individuals with Normal Hearing,” advised by Dr. Kelly Jahn. She worked with 25 native English-speaking adults with normal hearing who completed a cognitive test battery and a speed identification task for open-set sentence materials. Subjects were more accurate and faster to identify speech when the same talker was presented throughout variable background babble, if they had higher baseline verbal cognitive abilities, and when they had higher fluid cognition abilities. Saranya was awarded a prize in the Symposium.
• Anahi Estrada, Leonardo Gomez, and Bianca Velazquez presented “A Comparative Study of Classroom Reverberation Time Using Cellphone Apps at Texas A&M International University,” advised by advised by Dr. Sumalai Maroonroge. The group took measures of unoccupied classrooms on their campus and surveyed 61 college students about their learning environments, finding their university had a range of reverberation times (0.18-0.5 seconds) with students feeling there was room for improvement for speech understanding across a variety of spaces. Their group was awarded a prize in the Symposium.
• Kayla Stayton and Kyndall Thompson presented “Noise Levels in College Bars: A Pilot Study,” advised by Dr. Leigh Ann Reel and Dr. Candace Hicks. They used three different iPhones with a sound level meter application from the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health to take measures in five college bars. Calibration between samples and repeated Saturday night measures for 15-minute intervals at each location were compiled over a month. The mean equivalent loudness levels exceeded 85dBA for every sample at every location, indicating a high potential for bar attendees to have their hearing damaged if spending more than 47 minutes in these environs.
• Prabuddha Bhatarai presented “Self-Perceived Hearing Deficits Are Associated with the Emotional Responses to Sound,” advised by Dr. Kelly Jahn. He worked with 17 adults with normal hearing and 18 adults with cochlear implants who listened to 60 index sounds and rated their emotional valence and arousal for each sound. Scoring of emotion landed in a narrower range of values when signals contained vocal emotion cues than for other non-vocal stimuli. There was a significant positive relationship between a wider range of emotional scoring and better speech/spatial hearing performance. Adult cochlear implant users have a reduced range of emotional responses, increased difficulty perceiving vocal emotions, and greater self-perceived hearing deficits compared to normal-hearing peers.
• Rebecca Jones presented “The Role of Cochlear Implnat-Hearing Aid Performance Disparity in Bimodal Benefit,”advised by Dr. Priyanka Jaisinghani. She worked with 15 English-speaking adults with normal hearing for a sentence recognition task using simulated hearing aid and cochlear implant bandpass filtering to present a “bimodal” auditory signal under headphones. When the hearing aid ear bandpass allowed good signal fidelity up to 1000Hz, the bimodal performance was better than cochlear implant only performance. When bimodal benefit was good, there was a significantly smaller performance disparity between hearing aid-only and cochlear implant-only listening conditions. When the hearing aid-only and cochlear implant-only scores were more than 41 points apart, bimodal benefit was not present.
• Marlon Morales presented “Hyperacusis, Tinnitus, and Subjective Hearing Difficulties in Cochlear Implant Users,”advised by Dr. Kelly Jahn. He worked with 40 cochlear implant users via online survey for hyperacusis severity, listening fatigue, tinnitus handicap, and speech/spatial qualities of hearing. More than half of the participants rated themselves as more sound-sensitive than average, with a third of the total respondents also experiencing co-occurring hyperacusis and tinnitus. Significant positive relationships were found between hyperacusis severity and (1) speech/spatial qualities of sound, (2) listening fatigue, and (3) tinnitus handicap. Continued work is needed in this area as there seems to be a high rate of sound tolerance issues contributing to listening difficulties in this population.
• Inayat Sidhu presented “Personality Profiles of Individuals with Sound Sensitivity,” advised by Dr. Kelly Jahn. She analyzed responses from 248 participants with sound sensitivity who completed the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire (MPQ) and Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA). There was a significant negative relationship between the MAIA Trusting subscale and hyperacusis severity. There was a weak positive relationship between the MAIA Noticing subscale and hyperacusis severity. These two findings suggest personality traits and internal perceptual factures may influence sound sensitivity severity.

I hope you’ve enjoyed hearing about the work of our awesome student members. Maybe this article will inspire you, and it also serves as our open invitation to join us for the sixth edition of the Audiology Student Research Symposium at the TSHA 2027 Convention set for Dallas on January 29-30!