Dr. Flaherty鈥檚 research focuses on speech understanding in children with and without hearing loss. In particular, her research program investigates the way that age and listening experience impact speech perception for younger listeners in complex acoustic environments. Her most recent work aims to characterize children鈥檚 immature ability to use acoustic voice differences between talkers to improve speech-in-speech recognition. In addition to improving our understanding of the factors that contribute to children鈥檚 ability to recognize speech in multi-talker environments, the long term goals of her research include finding ways to improve communication outcomes for children with hearing loss.