PSYCH 222
Psychology of Hearing, interim 2022 (junior year)
Course Description
How do we hear? What do we hear? How do we know? This course examines the perception of the acoustic world through our sense of hearing. Topics include the structure of sound itself (acoustics), how sound is encoded and processed by the brain, and how we come to understand sound as something beyond a physical stimulus (representation, meaning, and interpretation). Additional topics include speech perception, music, hearing loss, and cochlear implants.
Course Content
Rationale
From my original proposal: This course is crucial to my major. It provides a large portion of the biological and psychological basis of hearing, a major process in linguistics, and in particular speech language pathology. The course integrates areas of psychological theory with applied linguistics, giving an overview of the potential reasons behind developmental delays and language development disorders, as well as the brain’s language processing abilities.
Fieldwork Assignments
The fieldwork assignments allowed me to apply my learning from the readings and lectures to the real world. The first fieldwork assignment involved naturalistic observations from the soundscape around us. Because I took this course online from my home in Texas, I was able to make some observations I would not have made on campus. The second fieldwork assignment involved the international phonetic alphabet (IPA) and listening to sounds that do not exist in the English language. Both assignments can be found below.
Takeaways
This course was by far the most technical and scientific of the courses I took for my individual major. It involved an understanding of the hearing mechanism, and both the physical and psychological processes involved in hearing. This course is extremely relevant to my continued study of speech language pathology, especially in understanding how having a hearing impairment can impact an individual. I learned a lot about the Deaf community and hearing loss in general, as well as the processes that exist to help the hearing impaired communicate more effectively. This class was fascinating and gave me a more technical understanding of linguistics that I am sure I will investigate further as I pursue more education.
Connections
This course connected most with PSYCH 235 (Sensation and Perception), as we discussed the hearing mechanism in-depth here too. However, of courses included in my individual major, this course connected most with PSYCH 237 (Cognitive Psychology) in its discussion of how the brain processes language and sound. This course page is linked below.
I also got involved with the cochlear implant speech therapy sessions through this course and Dr. Jeremy Loebach. This was my first experience doing actual speech therapy and working with an individual with a cochlear implant. More information about this experience can be found on my internships, grants, employment, and research page.