Oklahoma State University
Oklahoma State University

Projects

Deaf Experience, Deaf Expression (DXDX)

This long-term project aims to better understand how social and linguistic experiences affect the social and emotional well-being of young people with hearing loss. 

The end goal will be to create a publicly-available audio-video collection of interviews and conversations with all types of people with hearing loss. The collection will be useful for parents and educators to have first-hand accounts of the possible outcomes of the tough decisions they have to make about deaf children's communication and education. 

See our project webpage for more: dxdx.okstate.edu 

 

Project timeline:

  • Fall 2022-Summer 2023: Interview people with adult-onset hearing loss, their families and allies.
  • Summer 2022: Awarded Community Engagement Grant from OSU College of Arts & Sciences to interview more people.
  • Fall 2021-Summer 2023: Interview teens/tweens with hearing loss, their parents and siblings/friends.
  • Summer 2021: Awarded Community Engagement Grant from OSU College of Arts & Sciences to interview teens and parents over the next school year.
  • Spring 2021: Madison Pearson completed her master's thesis on the first results from her survey of adults with early hearing loss.
  • Spring/Summer 2021: Zoom interviews of adults with early hearing loss.
  • Spring 2021: Undergrads from Dr. Freeman's Deaf Communication & Education class join the team.
  • Summer 2020: Awarded OSU College of Arts & Sciences Research Seed Grant to interview adutls with early hearing loss.
  • Spring/Summer 2020: Grad student Madison Pearson created and administered the Social experience and hearing loss survey to adults with early hearing loss and their families.

Papers & Presentations (*student authors):

Funding (OSU College of Arts and Sciences)

  • Advancing Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity (AURCA), 2021–
  • Experiences of adult-onset hearing loss and allies: A video corpus, Community Engagement Grant, 2022–23
  • Socio-linguistic experiences of children with hearing loss and their families: A video corpus, Community Engagement Grant, 2021–22
  • Deaf Communication Corpus Pilot, Research Seed Grant, 2020–21

Past recruitments (currently closed for new participants):

Students (current on top):

Student Corner

Want to get involved? You can volunteer in the lab or work on DXDX for honors or research credit, often for as little as 2-3 hours per week. There are a variety of tasks and ways to contribute, e.g.:

  • Interviewing: Conduct interviews (usually paired with another student)
  • Recruiting: Gather contact info, email potential participants, post flyers
  • Scheduling: Keep track of everyone's availability, update appointment calendar, email participants
  • Transcribing/Captioning: Edit computer-generated transcripts
  • Annotating: Tag portions of recorded interivews by topic, demographics, quotes
  • Video editing: Extract clips, crop participants, blur names/faces, stitch topics together
  • Social media: Make images, write updates, post clips, link up with related groups
  • Thematic analysis: Look for patterns in the content of the interviews, e.g. on a chosen topic or interview question; look for relationships between experiences and opinions
  • Linguistic analysis: Linguistics students may use the corpus for a variety of research questions (see Dr. Freeman)
  • Database management: Create entries and maintain the collection of searchable interview clips
  • Computer programming: Help create the database, GUI, tagging system, etc.
  • Lab/project management: Keeping track of people, completed tasks, data organization, protocols, etc.
  • Marketing: Create educational/promotional (mostly digital) materials, connect with media, publicize the project

Data and materials:

  • Hour-long video-recorded Zoom interviews of adults with early hearing loss.
    • As of 2021: 42 adults with severe-profound HL since childhood (28 in speech + 16 in ASL, including 2 interviewed in both). Most middle-age; some cochlear implants; from all over USA.
    • In progress 2022: teenagers with HL and their parents (separately, mostly in speech).
  • Time-stamped annotations for topic and quotes for some videos (ongoing).
  • Video clips of quotes (ongoing).
  • Demographics of participants (age, region, hearing loss severity, age of diagnosis, assistive devices, language use, type of schooling, etc.)
  • Interview scripts, consent and demographic questions in Qualtrics, flyers, IRB forms, etc.
  • See also: Student Corner on the Social experience and hearing loss survey page.

Project ideas:

  • Pick an interview question/topic, sort and summarize responses. Example hot topics from adults with early HL:
    • Finding your place, social support growing up
    • Trouble understanding in school, accommodations
    • Misconceptions about HL
    • Advocacy
    • Speech vs sign language for deaf kids
    • Cochlear implants (esp. for infants)
    • Advice for parents
  • Compile advice for parents, teachers, healthcare workers, etc. about hot topics into informative videos, pamphlets, or webpages. 
  • Pick a type of participant (by demographics or experience) and look for common themes across their experiences or opinions.
  • Compare a subset of experiences between types of participants (e.g., bullying in school between kids with severe vs. mild loss, comfort witih socialization between kids who went to different types of schools or used speech vs sign).
  • ... So many possibilities -- What else are you interested in?

Browse the project website and email Dr. Freeman if you're interested.

 

Special thanks to the OSU College of Arts and Sciences for sponsoring this work!

CAS

Sociophonetics Lab

022 Social Sciences & Humanities Building | Stillwater, OK 74078 | sophonlab@okstate.edu