Illinois recognized 16 staff, including SHS office manager Andrea Paceley
Andrea Paceley provides support to SHS’ graduate programs (Photo provided)
Sixteen civil service employees were recognized for exceptional performance by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign—eight this year and eight in 2020. For the second consecutive year, concerns related to the COVID-19 pandemic precluded a banquet for employees honored with the Chancellor’s Distinguished Staff Award.
Each recipient receives $1,000 and a plaque. Recipients’ names also are engraved on a plaque displayed in the Illinois Human Resources Office. The names of past winners are online.
Permanent staff members with at least two years of service and retired employees in status appointments during the calendar year may be nominated for the award. A committee recommends finalists, who are then approved by Chancellor Robert Jones.
Experiences in managing pandemic-related issues came to the forefront in many of the nomination forms for 2021 recipients, including Andrea Paceley in the Department of Speech and Hearing Science in the College of Applied Health Sciences.
Paceley, the office manager of SHS, provides support to the graduate program – including graduate admissions – and carries out general office duties.
“The pandemic required a pivot on how we conduct recruitment events, such as our open house for admitted students. Andrea worked closely with the Educational Policy Committee and director of graduate studies to transition to a virtual format,” wrote nominator Ian B. Mertes, an assistant professor of speech and hearing science. “This required a tremendous amount of effort on Andrea’s part to help develop materials, ensure that necessary information was obtained from faculty, interface with the prospective students, schedule the events and send invites, and follow-up with attendees.”
Paceley’s workstation in the front office makes her the department’s first point of contact. “Those who call, e-mail or stop in are greeted with a friendly personality and a willingness to assist. On the occasion when she does not know the answer, she tracks it down and responds quickly,” Mertes wrote. ”She also sends timely reminders to make sure tasks have been completed, keeping departmental operations running smoothly.”
If hearing above 8 kHz is not important, why is the human auditory system capable of hearing up to 20 kHz?
Brian Monson (Photo by Brian L. Stauffer)
Can you imagine having a conversation that included none of the following consonant sounds: s, sh, f, and ph? Known as voiceless fricatives, much of their energy occurs at the range of human hearing above 8 kilohertz (kHz), called extended high frequencies. In general, consonants tend to have more energy at the extended high frequencies than vowels. Yet conventional clinical hearing tests do not assess the performance of the auditory system above 8 kHz—which is above the highest notes on a piano—because of a longstanding assumption that hearing above 8 kHz is not important.
As Speech and Hearing Science Assistant Professor Brian Monson explains, the assumption took root during the development of the telephone about 100 years ago, when speech signals had to be compressed for transmission across wires. Early researchers simply cut out certain frequencies and asked people if they could still understand what was being said.
“Basically, they found that you didn’t need to hear frequencies above 3 or 4 kHz to have really good intelligibility,” he said, “and that got interpreted as ‘energy at higher frequencies is not important for speech.’”
For more than 10 years, Dr. Monson has been intrigued by and trying to answer the question, “If hearing above 8 kHz is not important, why is the human auditory system capable of hearing up to 20 kHz?” He recently received a five-year, $2 million grant from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders to continue his work in this area with a study titled “The ecological significance of extended high-frequency hearing in humans,” a study on which he will collaborate with researchers at the University of North Carolina and Boys Town National Research Hospital.
Extended high frequencies and noise
In this area of research, Dr. Monson’s basic hypothesis is that not only does extended high-frequency hearing have utility for humans, it plays a role in speech perception. His research group was one of the first to examine the value of extended high frequencies in the speech signal, and the first to demonstrate that extended high frequencies help listeners to determine whether speakers are facing them or turned away from them.
His research has scientific implications, of course, and expanding the state of knowledge in speech and hearing science means a great deal to Dr. Monson. There also is the potential for practical applications of his findings as well, for audiology testing, diagnosis, and intervention.
First of all, only testing below 8 kHz in the clinic does not measure the true function of the auditory system. Extended high-frequency hearing loss is the most common loss in humans because it occurs naturally with aging, with substantial loss occurring even by middle age. So if extended high frequencies are found to play a significant role in speech comprehension, everyone eventually will be affected and everyone will have undiagnosed, or hidden, hearing losses which are not detected by standard audiograms. To date, Dr. Monson and his colleagues have found a modest relationship between extended high frequencies and speech comprehension, but, importantly, it is in noisy environments that extended high frequencies are the most valuable.
“The number one complaint of hearing aid users, for many years, has been that they still have a hard time understanding speech in noisy situations,” Dr. Monson said. “Hearing aids do not represent extended high frequencies.”
Is the impact on speech comprehension large enough to justify taking on the challenge of developing new hearing aid technologies that restore extended high-frequency hearing? That is one of the questions that he hopes to address in the newly funded study. It will expand on a study published in 2019 that simulated a cocktail party but used only two background talkers. The new study will create an even more realistic noisy environment by using multiple talkers in different locations around a listener, as well as realistic reverberations that recreate how sound bounces around different room settings. It also will include a localization experiment to investigate whether extended high frequencies help listeners to determine where the talker of interest is located, with the assumption that this ultimately helps listeners to tune out other talkers.
While he would like his research to result in effective restorative technologies for individuals with extended high frequency hearing loss, Dr. Monson is excited that it already provides compelling evidence for assessing extended high-frequency hearing in the audiology clinic. In a 2020 paper in Hearing Research, he and others argued that implementation of extended high-frequency audiometry into clinical practice is relatively easy. Furthermore, measurements of hearing loss at extended high frequencies do predict speech perception ability in noise, suggesting such measures could be useful in identifying individuals at risk for listening difficulties in noisy situations. As he continues his research in this area, he hopes that continuing to present his findings through journals and conferences that target audiologists will positively impact clinical practice.
All SHS students complete external internships, strengthening real-world skills and career pathways
All SHS students are required to take part in external placements, which are essentially internships with an external organization (Photo by Brian Stauffer)
Students in the Department of Speech and Hearing Science in the College of Applied Health Sciences expect excellent instruction in the classroom. When they venture off campus, however, is when they get a better sense of the career paths they might choose.
All SHS students are required to take part in external placements, which are essentially internships with an external organization. For some students in the master’s program for Speech-Language Pathology, external placements might begin as early as their second semester, said Noa Hannah, director of the audiology and speech-language pathology clinic in SHS. On the audiology side, said Clinical Assistant Professor Sadie Braun, students are given external placements in the summer after their first year in the four-year program.
“I think that our external placements are really the first place that our students get a sense of what audiology is like in the real world,” Braun said. “I think that’s when a lot starts to gel between what they’re learning in their academic classes and what they’re doing in clinic—that starts to come together when they get to their external placements.”
Hannah, who joined the university in 2019 and became clinic director in 2020, agreed, calling external placements “pivotal.”
“They’re pivotal in their learning because there’s only so much we can teach within the clinic,” Hannah said. “Going out on these externals is about professionalism, but … it’s really about understanding different cultures—different cultures of schools, different cultures of hospitals, different supervisory styles than what we have here at the university. So it’s pivotal in their learning how to apply their skills to new patient populations as well as new environments.”
Braun said audiology students gain experience in environments that we just can’t simulate within the SHS clinic environment.
“For example, we send them to a hearing aid manufacturer to get experience with the manufacturer side of things, or to a private practice or a big hospital so they get to see different environments audiologists can practice in and figure out where they might want to start in their first job,” she said.
Hannah said external placements give students the opportunity to deal with different patient populations, such as patients with dementia or traumatic brain injuries, or patients who have had strokes.
Braun said the external placements also help students to increase their independence and competence in using their skills.
There are also benefits for the organizations, such as hospitals and clinics, in which the students are placed.
“I think a lot of professionals just appreciate having some input in shaping the future of our field,” Braun said. “And when we send our students who have more experience, like a third-year audiology student, sometimes they can utilize that student who can be more independent to get a little bit of extra work done themselves.”
Braun said the external placements can also be a job “pipeline,” as some students are hired right out of their fourth-year placements.
For some UIUC alumni, it is a chance to give back, Hannah said.
“I have heard that they want input into teaching the next generation and I think the other thing is, people like teaching. People like sharing their knowledge … a lot of professionals enjoy that part of their profession and maybe don’t get that opportunity as often as they would like. This is a way to give back to a program that’s helped them to be successful.”
Any organization that is willing to act as an external placement for students in the Department of Speech and Hearing Science is encouraged to email Noa Hannah.
