Bio
Hi! I am Alicia from South America. I am someone who always dreams of reaching the stars, and is dedicated to working every day to achieve this. I was the first one in my family to go to university, later I was employed as a lecturer at the same university. I received scholarships to Flinders University for my Masters and the University of Melbourne for my PhD, which I completed in March of 2022.
I am a proactive person, self-motivated to work who loves research and science. I am curious and always looking for new learning opportunities. When working in teams, I like to contribute with ideas and hard work. I consider that communication is the key in every setting and, therefore, I am always clear on what I need and what I can deliver. I like to enjoy my job and therefore I am an advocate of a friendly work environment and I like to bring my best attitude to the workplace to make this possible
From My Blog
Latest Publication
Development of an Australian behavioural method for assessing listening task difficulty at high speech intelligibility levels
Objective
To develop and validate an Australian version of a behavioural test for assessing listening task difficulty at high speech intelligibility levels.
Design
In the SWIR-Aus test, listeners perform two tasks: identify the last word of each of seven sentences in a list and recall the identified words after each list. First, the test material was developed by creating seven-sentence lists with similar final-word features. Then, for the validation, participant’s performance on the SWIR-Aus test was compared when a binary mask noise reduction algorithm was on and off.
Study sample
All participants in this study had normal hearing thresholds. Nine participants (23.8–56.0 years) participated in the characterisation of the speech material. Another thirteen participants (18.4–59.1 years) participated in a pilot test to determine the SNR to use at the validation stage. Finally, twenty-four new participants (20.0–56.9 years) participated in the validation of the test.
Results
The results of the validation of the test showed that recall and identification scores were significantly better when the binary mask noise reduction algorithm was on compared to off.
Conclusions
The SWIR-Aus test was developed using Australian speech material and can be used for assessing task difficulty at high speech intelligibility levels
