Our lab conducts research on the perception of speech. Speech communication has an extraordinary resistance to distortion: intelligibility can be preserved when a substantial portion of the speech signal is eliminated by filtering, when large segments are deleted or replaced by silence, or when the signal is embedded in background noise and reverberation. In addition, listeners must cope with the enormous variability in the acoustic patterns of speech across talkers. To study this remarkable ability, we conduct listening tests to investigate the mechanisms of speech perception in normal hearing and in listeners with hearing loss.