Developed a model and tested the following hypotheses: (1) esthetic features--tempo, rhythm, dynamics, and phrasing in piano performance--are accurately perceived by audience members and (2) such perceptual veridicality does not depend upon one's degree of education/training and is therefore shared by critics and audience members. (PD)

The perception of syllable-initial stop consonants as voiced or voiceless was shown to depend on prevailing rate of articulation. Reducing articulatory rate of a precursor phrase causes a greater proportion of test consonants to be identified as voiced. Timing should be regarded as intrinsic to the acoustical specifications of phonetic events.…

The results suggested that all Ss used similar temporal frames of reference, but that hearing impaired Ss demonstrated developmental lags. (Author/DLS)

The ability to efficiently allocate attention between two tasks (auditory and visual memory tasks) differing in payoff was investigated among three grade levels: second, fourth, and college. There were seven males and three females from each grade level. (MP)

Reports on two experiments, one performed on infants, the other on adults, designed to examine the issue of categorical perception of speech contrasts in infants in relation to linguistic processing and the innateness theory of speech perception. (AM)

This study investigates the phenomenon that listeners of English were surprisingly accurate at predicting the temporal end of a sentence when only given the part up to the "potentially last word," that is a noun before an optional prepositional phrase of varying lengths. Results of four experiments using either French or English are given. (35…

Investigated how learners' perception of second language segments is affected by their first language by examining native Korean and Japanese speakers' perception of nasal segments in English. Also examined the perceived relationship between English syllable-final nasals and Japanese categories to provide insight into why one of the contrasts was…

Ten normally speaking children, 10 having mild misarticulations, and 10 having severe misarticulations, aged seven-eight, were administered unisensory and bisensory processing tasks. Results showed that misarticulating children obtained lower scores than normal children on all bisensory tasks and had larger decrements from unisensory to bisensory…

Examined were the influences of three conditions of predictability on word-recognition performance by 30 normally hearing listeners. Significant differences in word recognition were observed among high-predictability phrases, low-predictability phrases, and a constant predictability-neutral carrier phrase, using three specific signal-to-babble…

Investigates the incidence of segmental and prosodic contrasts in recorded sentence materials and the use of such distinctions in the processing of utterances. The chosen materials involve sites of parsing ambiguity. Results show that in the immediate interpretation of spoken language input, intonational contrasts function as clear structural…

Examined the possibility that auditory stimuli with properties of adult-to-infant speech are more detectable in a noisy ambient environment than ones that resemble adult-to-adult speech. Findings suggests that properties that characterize adult-to-infant speech may compensate for young infants' low-frequency deficits and therefore facilitate the…

This study of 94 college undergraduates, including 24 with a reading disability, found that speech perception was strongly related to 3 of 4 phonological variables, including short-term and long-term auditory memory and phoneme segmentation, which were in turn strongly related to reading. Nonverbal temporal processing was not related to any…

This study compared 112 younger and older adult monolingual English speakers and English/Spanish bilingual speakers on measures of auditory perception and memory span. The results revealed no age difference in auditory memory span in English but found that both older and younger bilinguals performed better than monolinguals on these tasks.…

The speech perception performance of 10 congenitally deaf and 3 postlingually deafened children who received multichannel cochlear implants were compared at preimplant and 6-month intervals up to 2 years. The congenitally deaf children did not exhibit measurably improved performance until after 12 months or more of implant use, whereas…