Research Laboratories

Voice Research Lab

The Voice Research Lab is located in room 223 Hoople and research on normal voice function, singing voice and pathological voice is conducted. Currently, our research interests include studies on the physiological basis of the trill, physiological effects of vocal warm-up and mechanisms for the control of vocal intensity.

Child Phonology Laboratory

Mary Louise Edwards

The Child Phonology lab is located in Suite 165 (165-06) at 621 Skytop Road. Most of the research in this lab has been conducted with young children, including children with typical development, children with phonological impairments, and children with both phonology and fluency disorders. Her most recent research, however, has focused on the phonological awareness and phonological processing abilities of older adolescents and young adults in a project entitled “The Phonological Abilities of Older Adolescents.” Jonathan Preston, a doctoral student, is currently collecting data for a project entitled “Phonological and Language Abilities of Adolescents with and without Speech Sound Disorders.”

Hearing Science Laboratory

Karen A. Doherty

The Hearing Science lab is located in Suite 165 (165-06) at 621 Skytop Road. The purpose of the current work in the Hearing Science lab is to use other measures to provide insight into how listeners process speech: weighting functions, to assess the listening strategies an individual uses to process spectral information in speech; response times, which is an indication of ease of listening; and analyses of speech errors, to identify the specific speech sounds a listener has trouble processing. One of our current projects is to compare listening strategies used by young and older listeners to process speech-in-noise. Several studies have shown that speech recognition in noise, regardless of hearing thresholds, declines with age. Reduced temporal and/or frequency resolution have been the most common explanations for these age-related differences. However, it is clear these two measures alone cannot fully account for the decline in older listeners’ ability to identify speech in the presence of noise. In our current work an alternative explanation related to how listeners use or weight information in speech is being examined.

To visit Dr. Doherty's research lab website, click here.