Dr. Yael Zaltz

Dr. Yael Zaltz is a senior staff member at the department of Communication Disorders, School of Health Professions, Faculty of Medicine, and Sagol School of Neuroscience, Tel Aviv University. Her research work in the areas of auditory skill learning and the behavioral and cortical mechanisms that underlie speech perception in individuals with normal hearing and with hearing impairment was presented in leading professional conferences and published in international scientific journals. She is also an audiologist and a speech therapist at Sheba medical center.

Dr. Zaltz examines the possibility to enhance the underlying psychoacoustic, linguistic, and cognitive mechanisms for speech perception in degraded listening conditions in normal and pathological populations via auditory training. She explores the behavioral effects of auditory training, including the time course of learning, magnitude of improvement, generalization, susceptibility to interferences, and long-term retention of the learning-gains. She is also the head of a neuroimaging lab that examines the cortical mechanisms that underlie speech perception in individuals with  normal hearing and with hearing .impairment using  functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS)