The sound suite was generously donated to the IU by Sacred Heart Hospital in Allentown and is a large, two room sound treated booth with a double walled sound dampened testing side. The booth is also equipped with a large tester/client window to allow for visual access during testing. The sound suite complies with ANSI and ASHA standards.
With the IU’s expansion and acquisition of the sound suite, the IU is now able to provide school districts with the option of referring students for a comprehensive audiological assessment and/or a central auditory processing assessment. More specifically, the comprehensive audiological assessment would provide school districts with frequency and ear specific hearing thresholds along with ear specific speech understanding abilities and allows for hearing loss to be diagnosed. The central auditory processing test battery can identify students who may be having listening problems in the areas of speech in noise understanding, auditory memory, dichotic listening(fusing information for overall meaning as heard from the left and right ears individually), and in temporal patterning (listening to the stress and rhythm patterns of speech).
Identifying these areas of weakness will enable the educational audiologist to gain information necessary to in-service team members about a student’s hearing needs and to make recommendations for specially designed instruction and specialized education plan purposes. On site testing began in February 2010 and is coordinated through the educational audiologist at IU 20. For further information about the sound suite, please contact Pam Schaffer at 610-515-6408 or pschaffer@ciu20.org.
