Funding for German-Israeli research project related to Hearing4all
As part of the “Research Cooperation Lower Saxony – Israel” program, the Ministry for Science and Culture of Lower Saxony is funding a joint hearing research project between the University of Oldenburg and the University of Haifa for four years with up to 500,000 euros.
The project was developed during a collaboration between Prof. Dr. Esther Ruigendijk, a linguist at the University of Oldenburg and principal investigator in the Hearing4all Cluster of Excellence, and Dr. Hanin Karawani Khoury from the University of Haifa, who was a visiting scholar in Oldenburg in 2024. In their collaborative project “Bilingualism in challenging listening conditions: Is it language specific or a general mechanism?”, Ruigendijk and Karawani want to investigate the influence of bilingualism on listening comprehension.
People who have grown up bilingual have greater difficulty processing verbal information in noisy environments than monolinguals. The research project of Karawani and Ruigendijk will shed light on this issue. The question is whether both languages are generally activated in the brain of bilinguals, or whether related languages challenge the auditory processing of bilinguals in particular.
To find out, the researchers and their teams are conducting experiments with bilingual test persons. The focus is on the language combinations Arabic–Hebrew, Arabic–German and German–Dutch, as well as on people who use Hebrew and German as their first and only languages. Using speech tasks and brain wave measurements, the project will investigate how bilingualism affects listening comprehension and auditory processing in the brain. The project will thus contribute to a better understanding of the challenges faced by bilinguals in noisy environments and the underlying mechanisms.
Fig.: Prof. Dr. Esther Ruigendijk and Dr. Hanin Karawani Khoury at a joint teaching event in Oldenburg (Photo: Esther Ruigendijk)
Further links:
Prof. Dr. Esther Ruigendijk – Institute of Dutch Studies
Dr. Hanin Karawani Khoury – Department of Communication Sciences and Disorder
Press release by the University of Oldenburg (in German)
Press release by the Ministry for Science and Culture of Lower Saxony (in German)
