We investigated how different psychophysical procedures affect frequency discrimination performance in children. Four studies used a design in which listeners heard two tone pairs and had to identify whether the first or second pair contained a higher frequency target tone. Thresholds for 6-and 7-year-olds were higher than those for 8- and…

Seventeen primary school deaf and hard-of-hearing children were given two types of training for 9 weeks each. Phonological training involved practice of /s, z, t, d/ in word final position in monomorphemic words. Morphological training involved learning and practicing the rules for forming third-person singular, present tense, past tense, and…

The aim of the study was to analyse speech perception of children with cochlear implants (N=29) and children fitted with traditional hearing aids (N=20). One- and two-syllable words were presented auditorily in a forced choice minimal-pair discrimination task. The children repeated the word and pointed to the appropriate picture presented on…

Children typically learn in classroom environments that have background noise and reverberation that interfere with accurate speech perception. Amplification technology can enhance the speech perception of students who are hard of hearing. Purpose: This study used a single-subject alternating treatments design to compare the speech recognition…

Elementary school children in three grade groups (Grades K/1, 3, and 5/6) completed either the auditory or the visual 1/9 vigilance task from the Gordon Diagnostic System (GDS) as well as subtests from the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children--Third Edition and auditory or visual processing subtests from the Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Cognitive…

Background: Claims that children with reading and oral language deficits have impaired perception of sequential sounds are usually based on psychophysical measures of auditory temporal processing (ATP) designed to characterise group performance. If we are to use these measures (e.g., the Tallal, 1980, Repetition Test) as the basis for intervention…

A proximal cause of reading disabilities is a deficit in phonological processing. A consequence of this deficit is inferior performance in one or more cognitive operations that use phonological information, including phonological awareness, lexical retrieval, and verbal memory. Some assert that these phonological processing difficulties are the…

The aim of this study was to examine the effects of sound-field amplification intervention on the acquisition of specific educational goals for children in mainstream cross-cultural classrooms. Twelve classes of Year 2 children participated in the project. For classes 1 to 8, the listening environments were alternated between amplified and…

The authors examined the differences in performance between 30 dyslexic readers in 4th grade, 30 dyslexic readers attending university, and age-matched normal readers for both groups on a lexical decision task to evaluate the underlying factors of dyslexia that persist into adulthood. In both age groups, the dyslexic readers were significantly…

We describe two experiments on signaling and detecting uncertainty in audiovisual speech by adults and children. In the first study, utterances from adult speakers and child speakers (aged 7-8) were elicited and annotated with a set of six audiovisual features. It was found that when adult speakers were uncertain they were more likely to produce…

This study investigated the ability of temporal processing measures obtained before school entry to predict early reading development in an unselected sample of 125 children (68 males, 57 females). Visual and auditory temporal order judgment (TOJ) tasks measured at Preschool (mean age 5.36 years) significantly predicted letter and word…

This article presents teachers' and children's views of the effectiveness of sound-field amplification intervention. The rating scale, Teacher Opinions re Performance in Classrooms (TOPIC) provided information on teacher perceptions regarding changes in student performance in unamplified "OFF" and amplified "ON" listening conditions. The teachers…

This study assesses the predictive validity of the Phelps Kindergarten Readiness Scale (PKRS) for later academic achievement and explores the utility of a domain-specific measure of kindergarten readiness. Kindergarten readiness scores were significantly correlated with both math and language arts achievement as measured by New York State…

This bulletin is the first in a series of summaries of research conducted in reading from 1955 to 1960. The publication includes both published and unpublished research during the 5-year period. The published research has been compiled largely from studies reported in educational periodicals. The unpublished research was made available through a…

Research on reading has tried, and failed, to account for wide disparities in reading skill even among children taught by the same method. Why do some children learn to read easily and quickly while others, in the same classroom and taught by the same teacher, don't learn to read at all? In "Language Development and Learning to Read", Diane…