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Psychoacoustic Research Lab
Focus of Lab
Lab Website: http://www.csd.jmu.edu/hallindc/prl/
The mission of the JMU PRL is to develop an understanding of the factors that affect speech understanding in the elderly. It has been suggested that elderly listeners have suprathreshold deficits in basic auditory capabilities, such as in temporal or spectral resolution, that affect their ability to understand speech in addition to the typical hearing loss that results from aging. Dr. Dan Halling, and others, have presented evidence that the deficits in temporal and spectral processing are the result of, rather than in addition to, the high frequency hearing loss usually found in elderly listeners, and that young listeners with equivalent hearing loss demonstrate similar processing abilities. A second mission of the PRL is to examine the effects of noise on speech intelligibility and other performance measures, including the annoyance factor associated with noise.
