About

Emily Buss is the Mark and Barbara Fried Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. Her research interests include children’s and parents’ rights and the legal system’s allocation of responsibility for children’s development among parent, child, and state. She served as an Associate Reporter for the American Law Institute’s first Restatement on the Law, Children and the Law, and was the principal drafter of chapters on children’s constitutional rights in schools and on state and parents’ obligation to educate children. Buss has focused on the impact of juvenile and criminal justice systems on human development and is currently pursuing a project supported by the University’s International Institute of Research in Paris, aimed at facilitating coordination across these systems with consideration of development over the life course. She teaches courses addressing her research subjects, as well as civil procedure and evidence.

Research topics

• Medicine
• Computer Science
• Physics
• Psychology
• Audiology
• Speech recognition
• Virology
• Acoustics
• Neuroscience
• Gastroenterology
• Biology
• Immunology
• Computational biology
• Genetics
• Chemistry

Selected publications

• Sensitivity to interaural phase as a function of frequency: Age effects measured with behavioral and electrophysiological tasks

  The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2026-04-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Temporal fine-structure processing, as measured with binaural tasks, declines with increasing age in adults. The purpose of this study was to determine whether an electrophysiological test of binaural temporal processing could be used as a proxy measure for behavioral performance to reliably capture this age dependence. The behavioral measure was the upper frequency limit for differentiating in-phase from out-of-phase tones. This was assessed in both quiet and in background noise. The electrophysiological measure was the acoustic change complex elicited by epochs of interaurally out-of-phase frequency modulation carried by tones of different frequencies. Adults with normal/near-normal hearing were tested on both measures. There were 20 participants in each of the three age groups categorized as young, middle-aged, and older. The upper frequency limit measured behaviorally declined with age. It also declined in the presence of background noise, but the noise effect was equivalent across age groups. The robustness of the acoustic change complex also declined with age and as a function of the carrier frequency. However, correlations between the behavioral and electrophysiological measures were modest at best, suggesting that the electrophysiological test as implemented in this study did not provide a robust proxy for behavioral performance.

  PublisherDOI

• Estimating Cochlear Implant Users’ Sound Localization Abilities With Two Loudspeakers

  Trends in Hearing · 2025-05-14

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The ability to tell where sound sources are in space is ecologically important for spatial awareness and communication in multisource environments. While hearing aids and cochlear implants (CIs) can support spatial hearing for some users, this ability is not routinely assessed clinically. The present study compared sound source localization for a 200-ms speech-shaped noise presented using real sources at 18° intervals from −54° to +54° azimuth and virtual sources that were simulated using amplitude panning with sources at −54° and +54°. Participants were 34 adult CI or electric-acoustic stimulation users, including individuals with single-sided deafness or aided acoustic hearing. The pattern of localization errors by participant was broadly similar for real and virtual sources, with some modest differences. For example, the root mean square (RMS) error for these two conditions was correlated at r = .89 ( p < .001), with a mean RMS elevation of 3.9° for virtual sources. These results suggest that sound source localization with two-speaker amplitude panning may provide clinically useful information when testing with real sources is infeasible.

  PublisherDOI

• Temporal and Spectral Cues for Phoneme Perception in School-Age Children and Adults

  Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research · 2025-08-07 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  PURPOSE: This study considered the impact of spectral and temporal smearing on vowel and consonant discrimination in school-age children and adults with normal hearing (NH). The overall purpose of this work was to test the hypothesis that degraded spectral cues preferentially impact vowel discrimination, while reduced access to temporal cues preferentially affects consonant discrimination. This work is a first step toward understanding how the effects of poor spectral and temporal resolution may affect phonological awareness and speech perception in children with cochlear hearing loss (C-HL) and auditory neuropathy (AN). METHOD: Participants were 10 young adults and 18 school-age children with NH. Speech perception testing included vowel and consonant minimal pair discrimination for stimuli that were either unprocessed, spectrally smeared, or temporally smeared. All participants completed psychophysical estimates of spectral, temporal, and intensity resolution as well as standardized assessments of phonological awareness and receptive vocabulary. RESULTS: Psychophysical estimates of spectral, temporal, and intensity resolution for unprocessed stimuli were consistent with previous literature, including improvement in thresholds as a function of child age. As predicted for both age groups, spectral smearing had greater effects on vowel discrimination, while temporal smearing had greater effects on consonant discrimination with minimal pairs differentiated by either presence/absence of a stop consonant or voicing. All participants demonstrated normal, age-adjusted, phonological awareness, and receptive vocabulary skills. CONCLUSIONS: For both children and adults, degraded spectral and temporal cues differentially affected access to vowel and consonant information. These results suggest the need for further investigations evaluating the effects of long-term reductions in access to spectral and temporal cues in children with hearing loss. This topic is particularly relevant to hearing losses such as C-HL and AN, which are primarily characterized by reduced perception of spectral and temporal acoustic cues, respectively. SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.29660819.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Minimum Audible Angle and the Acoustic Change Complex Elicited by Azimuthal Shifts in Low-Frequency Sounds: Effects of Age

  UNC Libraries · 2025-10-24

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This study compared the behavioral minimum audible angle (MAA) and the electrophysiological acoustic change complex (ACC) elicited by an azimuthal shift in sound location. To examine age effects, 63 participants with normal or near-normal hearing were divided into three age groups (Young, Mid-Aged, and Older). The stimuli were narrow bands of noise centered at 500 Hz to facilitate reliance on primarily binaural temporal cues. Putative spatial location was manipulated by means of head-related transfer functions under headphones. MAA results showed that performance was dependent on the reference location, with performance becoming poorer as the reference location shifted away from midline. The Young group had smaller MAAs than the Older group, and performance of the Mid-Age group was intermediate. Measurement of the ACC was restricted to shifts away from midline, and results showed no ACC for shifts of 4.5° and 9° but present ACCs for shifts of 13.5°, 18°, and 36°. The robustness of the ACC, as measured with the intertrial phase coherence metric, grew with increasing azimuthal shift. For shifts of 13.5° and 18°, Young participants had more robust ACCs than Older participants. Although age-related deficits were found in both the MAA and in the robustness of the ACC, no associations were observed at the individual level between MAA and ACC measures. Further work is necessary to evaluate the ACC elicited by shifts from off-midline reference locations before a firm conclusion can be reached that the ACC is not a viable objective proxy for the MAA.

  PublisherDOI

• Effects of low-pass filtering and visual cue availability on English consonant-in-noise recognition for late bilinguals and monolinguals

  The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2025-04-01

  article

  Late bilingual listeners are typically more susceptible to noise when listening to speech in their second language than monolinguals, particularly with auditory-only input. Limited research has examined how auditory-only and visual cue availability influences second-language speech-in-noise recognition. This project examines whether low-pass filtering of auditory cues results in greater performance decrements for late Spanish/English bilinguals compared to English monolinguals, given their differing susceptibility to background noise, and how visual cue availability moderates this effect. Additionally, we investigate the extent to which late bilinguals and monolinguals benefit from audiovisual cue availability at different points on the psychometric function during English consonant recognition in noise. To address these questions, we focus on the effect of face masks, which both low-pass filter speech and occlude visual cues, offering an ecologically valid approach to examine these effects. We assess English consonant recognition in open syllables, such as “key,” “she,” and “me,” in speech-shaped noise presented at four signal-to-noise ratios. Participants are tested under two acoustic filtering conditions (all-pass filter and low-pass filter) and two modality conditions (auditory-only and audiovisual). Findings and their implications will be discussed.

  PublisherDOI

• Development of the binaural intelligibility level difference for speech-in-speech recognition

  JASA Express Letters · 2025-10-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This study aimed to characterize maturation of the binaural intelligibility level difference (BILD) for school-age children in the context of speech-in-speech recognition. Children (5-17 years) and adults completed an adaptive, open-set sentence recognition task in a two-talker masker in two binaural conditions: (1) target and masker speech in-phase across the two ears, and (2) target speech presented 180° out-of-phase across the two ears and masker speech presented in-phase. Estimates of the BILD, computed as the difference score between the two binaural conditions, were mature by ten years of age, consistent with previous data on the BILD for speech-in-noise recognition.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Spectral weights for localization and speech-in-speech recognition with spatial separation of talkers on the horizontal plane

  The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2025-07-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Some previous research has suggested that sound source localization may not rely on the same cues that support the segregation of speech produced by talkers separated in space. The present experiments evaluated spectral weights for the spatial cues underlying these two tasks by filtering stimuli into 1-octave-wide bands and dispersing them on the horizontal plane. Target stimuli were 100-ms bursts of speech-shaped noise or words produced by 24 male and female talkers, and maskers (when present) were sequences of words. For localization in quiet, weights differed depending on the midpoint and band dispersion range, but they were similar for speech and noise stimuli. For bands dispersed between -15° and +15°, weights peaked at 500 and 1000 Hz. Introducing a speech masker changed the magnitude of weights for localization, but not the relative weight by frequency. For speech-in-speech recognition, sequences of masker words produced predominantly informational masking, such that participants had to rely on spatial cues to segregate the target. As for localization, recognition appeared to rely predominantly on spatial cues in the 500- and 1000-Hz bands. Trial-by-trial data suggest that correct word recognition relied on differences in perceived location of target and masker speech for some but not for all participants.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Masked-speech Recognition Using Human and Synthetic Cloned Speech.

  UNC Libraries · 2025-12-19

  articleOpen access

  Voice cloning is used to generate synthetic speech that mimics vocal characteristics of human talkers. This experiment used voice cloning to compare human and synthetic speech for intelligibility, human-likeness, and perceptual similarity, all tested in young adults with normal hearing. Masked-sentence recognition was evaluated using speech produced by five human talkers and their synthetically generated voice clones presented in speech-shaped noise at -6 dB signal-to-noise ratio. There were two types of sentences: semantically meaningful and nonsense. Human and automatic speech recognition scoring was used to evaluate performance. Participants were asked to rate human-likeness and determine whether pairs of sentences were produced by the same versus different people. As expected, sentence-recognition scores were worse for nonsense sentences compared to meaningful sentences, but they were similar for speech produced by human talkers and voice clones. Human-likeness scores were also similar for speech produced by human talkers and their voice clones. Participants were very good at identifying differences between voices but were less accurate at distinguishing between human/clone pairs, often leaning towards thinking they were produced by the same person. Reliability scoring by automatic speech recognition agreed with human reliability scoring for 98% of keywords and was minimally dependent on the context of the target sentences. Results provide preliminary support for the use of voice clones when evaluating the recognition of human and synthetic speech. More generally, voice synthesis and automatic speech recognition are promising tools for evaluating speech recognition in human listeners.

  PublisherDOI

• Test–Retest Reliability and Variability Over Time for Repeated Audiometric Assessment in Individuals With Down Syndrome

  American Journal of Audiology · 2025-09-11

  articleOpen access

  Purpose: High rates of hearing loss are observed for individuals with Down syndrome, and regular hearing assessment is recommended for children and adults. Unknown variability of threshold estimates for repeated auditory assessments for individuals with diverse intellectual abilities, such as individuals with Down syndrome, confounds the ability to determine true threshold changes between assessments. This study evaluated variability of pure-tone thresholds measured within and across test sessions for individuals with Down syndrome. Method: Participants included 27 individuals with Down syndrome, ages 5.1–46.5 years (average = 22.7, SD = 11.8). A group of 11 neurotypical individuals, ages 15.9–48.6 years (average = 24.5, SD = 10.3) was included in intrasession variability assessment. Pure-tone thresholds in quiet were measured at 1, 4, 8, and 11.2 kHz during a single session or during repeated audiograms separated by 2.7–11.2 months (average = 5.8, SD = 2.4) and 3.0–3.9 years (average = 3.4, SD = 0.4). Results: Intrasession variability was ≤ 10 dB for 94.3%–100% of thresholds for participants with Down syndrome, with similar variability observed for neurotypical participants. Threshold differences were ≤ 10 dB for 63.2%–85% of responses from audiograms separated by an average of 5.8 months and 37.5%–62.5% of responses separated by an average of 3.4 years. Conclusions: Intrasession variability for participants with Down syndrome aligns with current clinical standards accepting variability of ≤ 10 dB between repeated threshold estimates. Differences in repeated audiometric thresholds greater than 10 dB likely reflect true changes in hearing sensitivity. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.30052885

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The effect of linguistic experience on recognition (Cowan et al., 2025)

  figshare ASHA Publications · 2025-12-19

  otherOpen access

  <b>Purpose: </b>This project evaluates whether diverse linguistic experience influences second language (L2)–accented English sentence recognition in Spanish–English bilingual and English monolingual school-age children and adults.<b>Method: </b>Four groups of participants completed the study: 22 Spanish–English bilingual school-age children, 21 English monolingual school-age children, 19 Spanish–English bilingual adults, and 19 English monolingual adults. Participants completed English sentence recognition and English language testing. Sentence recognition was assessed in speech-shaped noise at ascending target-to-masker ratios in three accent conditions: Korean (unfamiliar to all), Midland (familiar to all), and Spanish (familiar to the bilingual group). Speech recognition thresholds associated with 50% correct performance (SRT50) and asymptotic performance were extracted from psychometric function fits to behavioral data.<b>Results: </b>Adults had lower (better) SRT50s in the Spanish and Korean accent conditions compared to children. Estimates of recognition in quiet were better for bilingual children tested in the Spanish and Korean accent conditions compared to monolingual children. The effect size was larger in the Spanish accent condition. There were no language group differences in performance among adults.<b>Conclusions: </b>For children, prior experience with a specific L2 accent offers significant benefit in accurately recognizing sentences spoken by talkers of that accent. This effect is not observed in adults, potentially reflecting differences in language experience between Spanish–English bilingual child and adult participants. Although greater diversity in linguistic input is also positively associated with recognition of unfamiliar accented speech in children, its effect is smaller than that of accent-specific experience.<b>Supplemental Material S1.</b> Additional information.Cowan, T. M., Buss, E., Leibold, L. J., &amp; Olmstead, A. J. (2025). The effect of diverse linguistic experience on second language–accented English sentence recognition among monolingual and Spanish–English bilingual children and adults. <i>Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research</i><i>, 69</i>(2), 756–773. https://doi.org/10.1044/2025_JSLHR-24-00695

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• A TEST OF CHILDREN'S ENGLISH/SPANISH SPEECH PERCEPTION IN NOISE OR SPEECH MASKERS

  NIH · $3.0M · 2016–2023

• Development and plasticity in normal and impaired ears

  NIH · $7.4M · 1986–2018

• Acoustic cues in auditory pattern analysis

  NIH · $2.1M · 2005–2017

• Factors influencing the behavioral assessment of hearing during infancy and childhood

  NIH · $1.6M · 2015–2021

Frequent coauthors

• Lori J. Leibold

  195 shared

• John H. Grose

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  193 shared

• Joseph W. Hall

  Glasgow Caledonian University

  192 shared

• Lauren Calandruccio

  81 shared

• Heather L. Porter

  Boys Town National Research Hospital

  60 shared

• Margaret T. Dillon

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  45 shared

• Margaret K. Miller

  Boys Town National Research Hospital

  35 shared

• Jacob Oleson

  32 shared

Education

• PhD, Psychology

  University of Pennsylvania

  1996

• MA, Psychology

  University of Pennsylvania

  1992

• BA

  Swarthmore College

  1990