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Improving Hearing Through Training

Hearing is about more than what reaches the ear. Beverly A. Wright studies how auditory perception can be trained. As a Berta Karlik Fellow at the Austrian Academy of Sciences’ Acoustics Research Institute, she is showing that our senses may be capable of more than we often give them credit for.

 07.09.2026
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We often assume that our senses are fixed. If you have poor vision, you need glasses. If you have trouble hearing, you need a hearing aid. Technology provides the solution, and that is where the story ends. Beverly A. Wright takes a different view. A professor at Northwestern University, she studies how our senses can be trained. Her research focuses on perceptual learning, or how our perceptual abilities can improve through practice.

Wright is currently a Berta Karlik Fellow at the Acoustics Research Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW). In this interview, she explains why training the auditory system is a little like working out a muscle, why the right amount of practice matters, and what her research could mean for clinical rehabilitation and language learning.

Read the full interview in German here

At a Glance

Beverly A. Wright is a professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Northwestern University’s School of Communication. Her research focuses on auditory perception and perceptual learning, including the conditions under which people learn to better distinguish sounds, pitches, rhythms, and speech sounds. Her work spans basic auditory processing, speech, and clinically relevant questions such as hearing loss and speech and reading disorders. From April through September 2026, she is a Berta Karlik Fellow at the Austrian Academy of Sciences’ Acoustics Research Institute.

The Berta Karlik Fellowship is named after physicist Berta Karlik, the first woman to become a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. The fellowship is aimed at outstanding women in STEM from around the world and is designed to foster international exchange and build lasting collaborations with OeAW institutes.

In addition to the Berta Karlik Fellowships, the OeAW also offers Academy Fellowships. These fellowships give internationally recognized researchers the opportunity to spend a sabbatical at an OeAW institute, providing dedicated time to pursue new research ideas without teaching or administrative responsibilities. Academy Fellows include demographer Mohammad Jalal Abbasi-Shavazi at the Vienna Institute of Demography and historian Pieter Judson at the Institute of Culture Studies.