# NIH grant: NEURAL DYNAMICS UNDERLYING SPEECH PROCESSING IN CHILDREN WITH UNILATERAL HEARING LOSS (1K01DC023235-01A1) — retained record

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NIH grant 1K01DC023235-01A1: NEURAL DYNAMICS UNDERLYING SPEECH PROCESSING IN CHILDREN WITH UNILATERAL HEARING LOSS
Institute: {'code': 'DC', 'abbreviation': 'NIDCD', 'name': 'National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders', 'admin_org_id': '12500019', 'admin_funding_url': ''}. PI: Nicole E. Corbin. Award: $134495.
Start: 2026-07-10T00:00:00.
PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT
Unilateral hearing loss (UHL) affects over 3 million school-age children in the United States. Children with UHL
(CUHL) are at significant risk for delayed or disordered auditory, cognitive, speech, and language development,
resulting in poor academic performance and quality of life. Currently, there is a distinct lack of empirical evidence
to guide rehabilitation for CUHL, leading to a costly, failure-based model of intervention with limited efficacy. This
underscores a critical, unmet healthcare need. Prior work has largely attributed the developmental difficulties of
CUHL to poorer speech perception resulting from spatial (i.e., binaural) hearing deficits. Emerging evidence
suggests this is an incomplete account of the speech perception challenges of CUHL. Even when CUHL have
speech presented to their unaffected, normal-hearing ear or utilize a hearing aid, speech perception challenges
persist. The research described in this K01 proposal tests the hypothesis that CUHL show experience-dependent
alterations in the neural representation of phonological information even when stimuli are presented to their
normal-hearing ear. The core premise is that consistent, quality input from both ears is critical in development to
ensure robust neural representations of phonemes. To test our innovative premise, we leverage world-class
resources and cutting-edge multimodal neuroimaging technology to—for the first time—characterize behavioral
speech perception in the normal-hearing ear of CUHL (Aim 1) and examine the neural dynamics of speech
perception in the normal-hearing ear of CUHL using magnetoencephalography (Aim 2). The goal of this K01
career development award is to directly advance the PI’s short-term career development goal of combining
cutting-edge neurophysiological and behavioral methodology to comprehensively characterize speech
perception in CUHL. Our specific objective in this K01 is to address the current gaps in the PI’s knowledge and
skills in applied cognitive neuroscience, factors related to individual differences in academic, auditory, and
language outcomes in hard-of-hearing children, and advanced statistical modeling. The expected outcome of
the proposed career development award is advancement of the PI’s long-term career goal of becoming a
productive, independent investigator whose program of research advances evidence-informed approaches to
the management of pediatric unilateral hearing loss. Completion of this novel proposal will also shift the current
spatial-hearing centric approach of studying CUHL to a more comprehensive, holistic focus that could provide
crucial insights into acoustics, speech, and language abilities involved in spoken language processing. This
research falls under NIDCD Research Priority Area 2: Understanding Diseases and Disorders, Changes in
Perception with Disease.
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