When someone has hearing loss, they may begin to rely on other senses to navigate the world. For example, if listening to speech is hard, visual information from a person’s face and mouth can make speech listening easier. This is especially true when a person is trying to listen in a noisy place, like a crowded restaurant or in a workplace. The long-term brain consequences of this multisensory reliance, sculpted by principles of neural plasticity, may change the way that visual information processed in the brain. Although there is some evidence that people with even mild or moderate hearing loss have larger brain responses to visual information than people without hearing loss, we do not fully understand how partial hearing losses affect the use of other senses, or whether these changes have positive or negative effects on overall perception and attention.
One line of our research examines how hearing loss affects the way that visual information is processed in our brain and how it affects speech listening ability.
Example research:
Paul B. T., Aguiar, P. V., & Hanna Al-Shaikh, J. (2026). Influence of age, gender, and speech-in-noise perception on lipreading ability for monosyllabic words. Speech Communication.103354. https://doi.org/10.1152/jn.00214.2025.
Paul, B. T., Srikanthanathan, A., Daien, M., & Dimitrijevic, A. (2026). Association between high-frequency hearing sensitivity and visual cross-modal plasticity during active visual stimulus processing. Journal of Neurophysiology, 135(1), 249-260. https://doi.org/10.1152/jn.00214.2025
Aguiar, P.V., Preman, J., & Paul, B.T. (2025). Cross-modal neuroplasticity in partial hearing loss: a mini-review. Frontiers in Neuroscience, section Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience. 19:1627888. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2025.1627888.
Aguiar, P. V., Williams, M. R., & Paul, B. T. (2025). Visual cortical responses in age-related hearing loss show evidence for compensatory neuroplasticity. GeroScience, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11357-025-02013-w.
Paul, B. T., Trinh, V.,. Chen, J., Le, T., Lin, V., & Dimitrijevic, A. (2025). Speech outcomes in cochlear implant users depend on visual cross-modal cortical activity measured before or after implantation. Brain Communications, 7 (1) fcaf071. https://doi.org/10.1093/braincomms/fcaf071
Paul, B. T., Munir, D*., Uzelac, M., Chen, J., Le, T., Lin, V., & Dimitrijevic, A. (2022) Evidence of visual crossmodal reorganization positively relates to speech outcomes in cochlear implant users. Scientific Reports, 12:17749. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-22117-z. * = co-first author
Xiu, B., Paul, B. T., Chen, J., Le., T., Lin, V. & Dimitrijevic, A. (2022). Neural responses to naturalistic audiovisual speech are related to listening demand in cochlear implant users. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. 16:1043499. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2022.1043499.
Prince, P., Paul, B. T., Chen, J., Le., T., Lin, V. & Dimitrijevic, A. (2021). Neural correlates of visual stimulus encoding and verbal working memory differ between cochlear implant users and normal-hearing controls. European Journal of Neuroscience, 54 (3), 5016-5037. doi:10.1111/ejn.15365
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