Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences

Anne Marie Tharpe, PhD, might not have become a worldwide authority on pediatric hearing loss if she hadn’t been looking for something to do during study hall in her high school years in Memphis. One day, she and a friend volunteered to work in a classroom with deaf children.

Surgeons face a delicate proposition when treating acoustic neuromas, benign tumors on the nerve that affect hearing and balance. Removing small tumors through surgery and radiation can cause complications such as the loss of hearing, when the tumors may not grow and impact quality of life for years. But not removing them can allow them to grow and be more difficult to remove and pose even greater risks.

Adult patients now have a convenient new option for hearing evaluations, hearing aid consultations and fittings and other services with the opening of a new audiology clinic in Green Hills.

Children with hearing loss who use remote microphone systems (RMS) at home have access to about 42 percent more words each day, providing a critical boost to vocabulary and language learning, a Vanderbilt study has found.

Ralph Ohde, PhD, professor emeritus of Hearing and Speech Sciences at the Vanderbilt Bill Wilkerson Center, died Jan. 8. He was 73.

A Vanderbilt researcher has developed a new technique to measure body movement that can be employed in fields that study gestures.

Scientists have known that the brain detects where sound comes from based on a couple of major cues — when the sound hits each ear (interaural time difference) and what the sound level is when it does (interaural level difference.) Less is known, however, about where and how that spatial hearing information is processed in the brain.