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multicenter study in collaboration with colleagues at the Uni- versity of Iowa and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This work demonstrated the impact of early hearing aid fitting and use on linguistic and academic development over a 10-year period in a large group of children who were hard of hearing compared with normal-hearing age-mates (Moeller and Tomblin, 2015; Tomblin et al., 2015; see ochlstudy.org).
The BTNRH faculty have also made important contributions to research on cochlear implants as well as basic research on psychoacoustics and on speech perception. Work on cochlear implants was begun by Robert Shannon (Shannon, 1989) and continued by Michelle Hughes (Hughes and Stille, 2009) and Monita Chatterjee and Adam Bosen (Bosen and Chatterjee, 2016). Much of this work relied on methodology developed in the psychoacoustics literature. Examples of BTNRH con- tributions in that area include work by Stelmachowicz on the growth of masking in listeners with hearing loss (Stelmacho- wicz et al., 1987), by Neff on informational masking (Neff, 1995; Leibold and Neff, 2007), and by Huanping Dai on pitch perception (Dai, 2000). The author has worked on a number of psychoacoustics topics ranging from forward masking (Jesteadt et al., 1982) to loudness summation (Jesteadt et al., 2019). BTNRH publications on speech perception have ranged from work by Susan Nittrouer (2001) on phonetics to more recent work by Buss, Leibold, and colleagues (2017) on the effects of masking on speech perception by children.
Recent Developments
Many people contributed to the BTNRH research program over the years, but by 2010, there was concern that several members of the long-term core group would be retiring at about the same time, without obvious replacements available for key leadership positions. The BTNRH had always been most successful at recruiting people early in their careers, and many of those people had moved to positions in universi- ties. We had not recruited an established, midlevel researcher since Keefe joined the staff in 1995. Several of our more recently recruited early-career people were not successful in obtaining external support for their research programs, and it was also unclear who would eventually replace the BTNRH founding director, Patrick Brookhouser, or how that transi- tion would be handled.
Much of this uncertainty was resolved over the next few years. Pat Brookhouser died unexpectedly in the fall of 2011 and was replaced by our long-term hospital administrator who con- tinued the strong institutional commitment to the research
program. Monita Chatterjee moved her well-established cochlear implant research program to the BTNRH in 2012, attracted by the availability of cochlear implant patients and freedom from teaching and other university duties, the same factors that drew scientists to the BTNRH in its early years of development. In 2014, the BTNRH received NIH funding for a center of excellence in research related to perception and com- munication in children. The new funding provided support for several of our early-career investigators and a mechanism for recruiting and supporting additional scientists over the coming years with the goal of expanding the research program into new areas. In 2015, we were able to recruit Lori Leibold, a former BTNRH postdoctoral fellow, to return as director of the NIH-funded center as well as of our Center for Hearing Research. Her interests in auditory development (Leibold et al., 2019) made her an excellent fit for both positions. In 2017, Ryan McCreery, who had established an independent research program at the BTNRH in 2011, was appointed as director of research. McCreery in turn led the effort to recruit Karla McGregor as a successor to Mary Pat Moeller, with the goal of developing a program in developmental language disor- ders, with six additional positions to be filled over the next few years. In 2019, G. Christopher Stecker moved his spatial hearing research program to the BTNRH and is in the process of equipping a new anechoic chamber that will be an important core resource for the hearing research program.
Because we now have a better understanding of the peripheral auditory system than we did in the early days of the BTNRH, the emphasis in the recent expansion of the research program has shifted to work on perception in more complex auditory environments (e.g., Leibold et al., 2019) and the contributions of memory and executive function to development of speech and language. This is now one of the few programs to have NIH-funded research on both peripheral and central mecha- nisms, evaluating both hearing aids and cochlear implants, in both children and adults. After 48 years, the BTNRH research program in hearing, speech, and language continues to grow and to have a major impact on the diagnosis and treatment of communication disorders in children.
Acknowledgments
This description of research at the Boys Town National Research Hospital (BTNRH) benefitted from careful edit- ing by Monita Chatterjee, Michael Gorga, Dougal Keefe, Lori Leibold, Mary Pat Moeller, Stephen Neely and Arthur Popper. Skip Kennedy and Marcin Wróblewski helped with the figures.
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