Dr. Emily Tobey is Professor and Nelle C. Johnston Chair in Early Childhood Communication Disorders at the University of Texas at Dallas.  She is adjunct professor in the department of otolaryngology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.   Her honors include Summer Distinguished Lecturer-in-Residence at Texas Woman's University; Distinguished Academy Scientist, Louisiana Academy of Sciences; Fellow of the American Speech-Language and Hearing Association and Acoustical Society of America; Visiting Scholar at the Australian Bionic Ear and Hearing Research Institute; and Visiting Research Professor at the University of Montpellier,. She was recently named the Polykarp Kusch Lecturer for the University of Texas at Dallas, the highest individual honor granted by the University to a faculty member.  She has received external funding from the National Institutes of Health and private foundations for the past 30 years.  She has served on NIH study sections, presented at the National Consensus Conference on Cochlear Implants, served as a working member on the committee on Research and Research Training Needs of Oral/Auditory Hearing-Impaired Persons sponsored by the NIH, and served as a NIH-NIDCD Expert Scientific Panel Member for revising the "Speech and Speech Disorders" section of the National Strategic Plan. She has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles on communication and its disorders.

Dr. Tobey's research involves how auditory feedback influences communication behaviors including speech perception, speech production, language development, and communication interactions. Her current studies focus on how various types of sensory aids (i.e., hearing aids, tactile aids, and cochlear implants) influence the development and maintenance of speech and language in persons with profound hearing losses. At the moment, her investigations fall into three lines of research. The first series of studies investigates the speech production characteristics of individuals with unusual hearing losses or unusual settings of sensory aids. Examination of these individuals allows us to determine the consequence of damage to specific areas of the cochlea on speech production.

The second line of investigation focuses on the development of speech production in profoundly hearing impaired children using conventional hearing aids, tactile aids, or cochlear implants in a controlled educational setting. Investigating the development of speech in these children allow us to tease apart changes in speech production that are due to maturation versus feedback from different types of devices.
The third avenue of her research explores how rapidly auditory feedback influences speech production by experimentally changing information provided by a cochlear implant. These studies allow us to determine what specific features of speech should be coded by an implant to change speech production and how rapidly we might expect to observe changes.