Two experiments were conducted to examine the performance of normal adults, normal children, and children diagnosed with central auditory dysfunction presumed to involve the interhemispheric pathways on a dichotic digits test in common clinical use for the diagnosis of central auditory processing disorder (CAPD) and its corresponding visual…

Purpose: To compare the effectiveness of 3 self-administered strategies for auditory training that might improve speech perception by adult users of cochlear implants. The strategies are based, respectively, on discriminating isolated words, words in sentences, and phonemes in nonsense syllables. Method: Participants were 18 normal-hearing adults…

Background: Nasometry has supplemented perceptual assessments of nasality, using speech stimuli, which are devoid of nasal consonants. However, such speech stimuli are not representative of conversational speech. A weak relationship has been found in previous studies between perceptual ratings of hypernasality and nasalance scores for passages…

This study examined the effects of playing by ear in selected keys on the abilities of musicians (N = 28) to play by ear and sight-read in those keys. Middle school band students in the experimental group learned melodies by ear in one familiar and two unfamiliar keys, and did no music reading in the new keys, while students in the contact-control…

Background: In this paper, we consider music education in a broad sense-not merely pertaining to the development of exceptional levels of artistry in talented performers, but also to notions of musical listening and appreciation enjoyed by the casual listener. Purpose: This review cannot be exhaustive, but aims to illustrate what we already know…

Brain imaging studies of voice perception often contrast activation from vocal and verbal tasks to identify regions uniquely involved in processing voice. However, such a strategy precludes detection of the functional relationship between speech and voice perception. In a pair of experiments involving identifying voices from native and foreign…

The present study investigated the possible role of ceiling effects in producing laterality effects of small magnitude in dichotic emotion detection. Twenty two right-handed undergraduate students participated in the present experiment. They were required to detect the presence of a target emotion in the expressions tones of happiness, sadness,…

At the level of clinical speech/language evaluation, the repetition type of conduction aphasia is characterized by repetition difficulties concomitant with reduced short-term memory capacities, in the presence of fluent spontaneous speech as well as unimpaired naming and reading abilities. It is still unsettled which dysfunctions of the…

This experiment was conducted to investigate cross-modal interactions in the emotional experience of music listeners. Previous research showed that visual information present in a musical performance is rich in expressive content, and moderates the subjective emotional experience of a participant listening and/or observing musical stimuli [Vines,…

Purpose: To compare speech intelligibility in the presence of a 10-Hz square-wave noise masker in younger and older listeners and to relate performance to recovery from forward masking. Method: The signal-to-noise ratio required to achieve 50% sentence identification in the presence of a 10-Hz square-wave noise masker was obtained for each of the…

Four experiments examined transfer of noncorresponding spatial stimulus-response associations to an auditory Simon task for which stimulus location was irrelevant. Experiment 1 established that, for a horizontal auditory Simon task, transfer of spatial associations occurs after 300 trials of practice with an incompatible mapping of auditory …

Two same/different discrimination tasks were performed by amateur-musician subjects in this functional magnetic resonance imaging study: Melody Discrimination and Harmony Discrimination. Both tasks led to activations not only in classic working memory areas--such as the cingulate gyrus and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex--but in a series of…

Speakers employ acoustic cues (pitch accents) to indicate that a word is important, but may also use visual cues (beat gestures, head nods, eyebrow movements) for this purpose. Even though these acoustic and visual cues are related, the exact nature of this relationship is far from well understood. We investigate whether producing a visual beat…

To segment continuous speech into its component words, listeners make use of language rhythm; because rhythm differs across languages, so do the segmentation procedures which listeners use. For each of stress-, syllable-and mora-based rhythmic structure, perceptual experiments have led to the discovery of corresponding segmentation procedures. In…

Williams syndrome (WS) is a neurodevelopmental genetic disorder often described as being characterized by a dissociative cognitive architecture, in which profound impairments of visuo-spatial cognition contrast with relative preservation of linguistic, face recognition and auditory short-memory abilities. This asymmetric and dissociative cognition…