Welcome to the Auditory Lab, directed by Dr. Christian Stilp. Our lab examines how and why speech perception works, addressing a number of questions that are important for everyday hearing: How do we understand speech? How do we overcome extreme acoustic variability to recognize the sounds that we hear? How does experience shape our ability to distinguish sounds? What principles of neural organization and computation underlie these abilities? We primarily examine these questions in listeners with healthy hearing with the long-term goal of applying this knowledge toward improving speech perception for listeners with hearing-impairments, such as those who use hearing aids and/or cochlear implants to hear. This work is supported by a grant (R01DC020303) from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Institute of Deafness and other Communication Disorders (NIDCD).
Our current project is seeking listeners with healthy hearing to study how recently-heard sounds affect perception of later speech sounds. This involves a one-hour session of listening to and identifying speech sounds, for which you would be paid $15. Experiments vary as to whether the speech you will be hearing will be presented alone, in background noise, or in simulations of how hearing aids or cochlear implants process speech for listeners who use them. Scheduling is flexible.
If you are interested in participating, at least 18 years of age, a native English speaker, and have no known hearing problems, please email AuditoryLab@marquette.edu.
The lab is staffed by Graduate Assistants, undergraduate students registered in SPPA 4956, and volunteers. Lab duties vary widely but definitely involve hands-on experience in different stages of the research process. There are no requirements about previous research experience in order to work in the lab, so if you are interested, please contact us at AuditoryLab@marquette.edu or christian.stilp@marquette.edu
