Describes three experiments that examined the processing of speech by dyslexic readers. Compares their performance with that of age-matched and reading-ability-matched controls. Shows that dyslexics have difficulty with the nonlexical procedures involved in verbal repetition. (HOD)

Investigates the silent pauses in continuous speech in three genres: political speeches, political interviews, and casual interviews in order to see how the semantic-syntactic information of the message, the duration of silent pauses, and the acoustic environment of these pauses interact to produce the listener's perception of pauses. (Author/SED)

The study involving 54 children (10 to 15 years old) was concerned with identification of conceptual functioning as an avenue of differentiating between auditory processing problems and primary ego development difficulties within the context of appropriate instructional/remediation strategies. (Author/SBH)

The effects of visual and auditory process training on reading achievement were explored with 24 learning disabled elementary age students assigned to three treatment groups (auditory training and reading group, visual training and reading group, and reading only group). (Author/PHR)

Describes some of the difficulties involved in conducting language evaluation tests in Edinburgh, Scotland. Reports some results of a pilot study. (RL)

Reports a study showing that subjects can make discriminative judgments about a speaker's sex and race from his tape-recorded speech. Filtering the speech signal adversely affects race but not sex identification. Listener accuracy and confidence for sex judgments are greater than for race judgments. (PMJ)

Subjects listened to sounds of individual musical instruments and matched these to instrument pictures. Second graders scored significantly higher than first graders; rank orders of instruments according to association difficulty, however, were markedly similar between grades. Results support the view that children bring much music knowledge to…

Examines the development of grapheme-phoneme conversion ability in normal and reading-age matched dyslexic readers. Thirty-six normal readers (mean age 9.5 years) and 18 children diagnosed dyslexic (mean age 12.1 years) served as subjects. (MP)

Explored the relationships among visual and auditory perception, academic aptitude, sex, and school achievement. Results indicate visual perception added significantly to prediction of achievement beyond that available through knowledge of a participant's sex and academic aptitude. (Author)

Five first-hand Web page accounts of unusual sensory perceptual experiences written by persons with high-functioning autism were selected for qualitative analysis. Four core categories emerged: turbulent sensory perceptual experiences; coping mechanisms; enjoyable sensory perceptual experiences; and awareness of being different, suggesting they…

A study that compared the receptive and expressive prosodic abilities of 30 Dutch children (ages 4-6) with language impairments to the abilities of typical children, found they performed less accurately on a prosodic imitation task but did not differ on an emotion identification task. Children performed better with increasing age. (Author/CR)

Eighteen children (ages 6-16) with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) were compared to 20 controls on both process and product scores from the California Verbal Learning Test for Children. Children with ADHD initially learned the same number of words as controls but showed weaknesses recalling the words after delays. (Contains…

A study examined if 10 children (ages 4-12) with repaired cleft palate who demonstrate posterior placement of alveolar targets differed from 10 children with cleft palate without such error patterns, and from 10 controls in the perception of alveolar targets. Children with posterior placement appeared unable to distinguish alveolar targets.…

An imitative test of speech pattern contrast perception was administered to profoundly deaf children using hearing aids (n=76) or cochlear implants (n=18). Implant users performed, on average, similarly to individuals with an 88 decibel hearing loss, indicating that implant use can provide auditory speech perception capacity similar to that of…

Data analysis using the Macintosh SoundEdit software showed that the signal contains the exact reverse of what the phonological rules of assimilation predict, i.e., the rules are not based on actual differences in the acoustic signal. Possible applications of SoundEdit in helping second-language learners improve their pronunciation are discussed.…