Charlotte M. Reed

Charlotte M. Reed

Research Affiliate, Research Laboratory of Electronics

77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139

cmreed@mit.edu

Administrative Assistant

Arlene Wint
Room 36-872
617.324.4349
aewint@mit.edu

Dr. Charlotte M. Reed is a principal investigator in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She received the B.S. from Carlow College in 1969 and the Ph.D. in psychoacoustics from the University of Pittsburgh in 1973. She joined RLE as a postdoctoral fellow in 1975, and was promoted to Principal Research Scientist in 1989 and Senior Research Scientist in 2003.

Dr. Reed’s research is concerned with the development of improved communication aids for persons with hearing impairment and deafness.  One current area of her research is directed toward improved speech reception for users of hearing aids.  This research includes experimental work on understanding the role of the slowly varying envelope cues and the more rapidly varying temporal fine-structure cues of the speech in listeners with normal and impaired hearing.  This research makes use of simulations of hearing impairment in listeners with normal hearing to understand the role of audibility in the performance of hearing-impaired listeners on a variety of speech-reception and psychoacoustic tasks.  Dr. Reed has also worked in the area of tactual communication of speech including the development and evaluation of tactual aids which can substitute for hearing in persons with profound deafness.  Dr. Reed is currently interested in understanding the interactions between the senses of hearing and touch in persons with normal hearing and sensorineural hearing loss and how information is combined across the two senses.  Because such multisensory interactions are an important aspect of human communication, disruptions in the ability to process information from two or more senses simultaneously may  contribute to a variety of human communication disorders.

Keywords

hearing impairment, speech communication, hearing aids, simulation of hearing loss, tactile sense, tactile aids, multi-sensory integration