Sarah Hargus Ferguson, PhD

Dr. Sarah Hargus Ferguson received her master’s degree in audiology at the University of Maryland in 1993. She completed her Clinical Fellowship Year at the Medical University of South Carolina, where she was involved in a longitudinal study of hearing and aging. She then moved on to the University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC), working as a clinical and research audiologist there for nearly 3 years. In 1997, Dr. Ferguson left UMMC to pursue a Ph.D. in audiology at Indiana University, and ultimately earned a joint Ph.D. in audiology and cognitive science in 2002. After working at the University of Kansas for several years, Dr. Ferguson joined the faculty at the University of Utah. Her research is focused on speech understanding in older adults, and how speech acoustic characteristics affect that understanding. She is especially interested talker factors such as speaking style, dialect, and foreign accent. In addition to speech understanding, recent work in Dr. Ferguson's lab has explored listeners' perception of speech indexical factors such as talker age, gender, and emotional state.

Research Statement

The degree to which speech communication is successful is affected by many variables. These include listener characteristics like hearing loss, environment characteristics like background noise, and message factors like linguistic complexity. Talker factors also play an important role. Talker behaviors, like speaking more clearly, can help improve speech understanding, while certain talker characteristics, like being a non-native speaker of the target language, can make speech understanding more difficult for the listener. My research focuses on these talker factors and how they affect the everyday speech understanding abilities of older adults with hearing loss. Methods include both perceptual and acoustic analyses. My goal is to identify the acoustic characteristics that underlie speech understanding so that beneficial acoustic properties can be exploited and harmful ones can be ameliorated through signal processing or by training talkers to produce more intelligible speech.