A Unique Mural for Children with Unique Communication Needs

theme with cartoon animals floating in space with a wide variety of assistive devices, including hearing aids and cochlear implants. The second follows a “LEAP is where children learn” theme, and consists of a diverse group of children jumping for joy around a frog.

“The mural depicts many of the elements around which LEAP is centered, including literacy, communication and diversity,” said LEAP Director José Ortiz, a clinical assistant professor in the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences (HESP).

“Professor Donahue-Shipp and his students drew on concepts fundamental to LEAP to provide a faithful visual representation of our program, and have provided a wonderful contribution to our department through this mural.”

STUDENTS IN THE DEPARTMENT OF ART installed a permanent mural collage in front of LeFrak Hall’s LanguageLearning Early Advantage Program (LEAP) classroom in March to celebrate the children served there.

The installation, directed by Assistant Professor Brandon Donahue-Shipp of the College of Arts and Humanities, has two distinct parts. The first follows a “LEAP for the Stars”

Training Can Improve Older Adults’ Ability to Discriminate Rapid Changes in Sound

NEW HESP RESEARCH published by Professors Samira Anderson Sandra Gordon-Salant and Matthew Goupell offers hope for those who struggle to understand what’s being said in noisy situations.

In a paper published in the Journal of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology the researchers found that younger (18-30) and older (65-85) individuals with normal hearing and older individuals with hearing impairment could undergo training to improve their ability to detect subtle changes in the rate of sounds that can make it difficult to understand speech in challenging situations. These scenarios

The process was inspired by the University of Maryland’s Arts for All initiative, an effort to bolster a campus-wide culture of creativity and innovation. •

Read include noisy or reverberant environments, or when listening to people who speak at a fast rate.

The training the researchers provided to the 40-person experimental group involved participants comparing multiple series of rapid tones in nine sessions over the course of three weeks. Compared to the 37-person control group who was asked to detect a single tone in noise that varied in intensity depending on their performance, results from the experimental group showed overall improvement.

“We’ve seen some evidence that these temporal processing deficits might be improved in animal models, but this is the first time we've shown it in humans,” Anderson said.

The research found that older normalhearing people who undergo training can essentially restore their ability to discriminate fast changes in the timing of sounds to levels similar to those observed for young adults. •