Edwards, Thomas G.Computer models of cochlear processing take exceedingly long times to run, even for short data sets. A data acquisition system was developed for a new switched-capacitor VLSI cochlea model chip, in order to rapidly perform cochleaI processing on digitzed speech samples. The system is capable of processing very long speech samples. Processing is in near-real-time, though it, takes about 2 minutes per second of speech to write the large amount of data to a hard drive. Software has also been developed to convert the output data into a form readable by the ESPS digital signal processing package from Entropic Speech, Inc.en-USThesis