Purpose: It has long been known that children with specific language impairment (SLI) can demonstrate difficulty with auditory speech perception. However, speech perception can also involve the integration of both auditory and visual articulatory information. Method: Fifty-six preschool children, half with and half without SLI, were studied in…

Background: The purpose of the study was to describe sensorimotor profile in children with mild intellectual disability (ID), and to examine the association between cognitive and motor function. Methods: A total of 233 children with mild ID aged 7 to 8 years were evaluated with measures of cognitive, motor and sensory integrative functioning.…

The ability to process simultaneously presented auditory and visual information is a necessary component underlying many cognitive tasks. While this ability is often taken for granted, there is evidence that under many conditions auditory input attenuates processing of corresponding visual input. The current study investigated infants' processing…

Patterns of sensory abnormalities in children and adults with autism were examined using the Diagnostic Interview for Social and Communication Disorders (DISCO). This interview elicits detailed information about responsiveness to a wide range of sensory stimuli. Study 1 showed that over 90% of children with autism had sensory abnormalities and had…

Patients diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder, show impaired integration of information across different senses. The processing-level from which this impairment originates, however, remains unclear. We investigated low-level integration of auditory and visual stimuli in subjects with Autism Spectrum Disorder. High-functioning adult subjects…

We investigate the dynamics of sensory integration for perceiving musical performance, a complex natural behavior. Thirty musically trained participants saw, heard, or both saw and heard, performances by two clarinetists. All participants used a sliding potentiometer to make continuous judgments of tension (a measure correlated with emotional…

The Behavior Observation Scale was used to compare normal (N=10), retarded (N=10), and autistic (N=10) children. Analysis indicated overlap between retarded and autistic children and a distinct autistic behavioral pattern involving disturbances of sensory modulation and motility. (Author/DB)

Auditory evoked responses (AERs) were recorded for 16 autistic children (ages 2-10 years) and age matched normal and retarded controls. The pattern characterizing the effects on AERs of coupling sound and light (conditioning phenomenon) was observed for both autistic and normal controls, but not for retarded children. (Author/DB)

The sensorimotor transformations necessary for generating appropriate motor commands depend on both current and previously acquired sensory information. To investigate the relative impact (or weighting) of visual and haptic information about object size during grasping movements, we let normal subjects perform a task in which, unbeknownst to the…

G. Senf's study of bisensory integration language tasks was modified and replicated with 52 normal and 52 learning disabled children. Results confirmed the original study except for a more consistent pattern for individual difference variables and failure to replicate the main effect of stimulus interpair presentation times. (Author/CL)

Findings revealed significant correlations between all three measures of visual motor development as well as those measures and the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised Performance IQ. The VMI-Revised appeared appropriate for measuring paper/pencil fine motor aspects of visual perceptual development in children. (CL)

Two partly overlapping frequency glides can be perceived as consisting of a long pitch trajectory accompanied by a short tone in the temporal middle. It was found that the appearance of this middle tone could not be related to peripheral processes concerned with spectral splatter or combination tones that could have emerged during the overlap of…

We report a 53-year-old patient (AWF) who has an acquired deficit of audiovisual speech integration, characterized by a perceived temporal mismatch between speech sounds and the sight of moving lips. AWF was less accurate on an auditory digit span task with vision of a speaker's face as compared to a condition in which no visual information from…

In many theories of cognition, researchers propose that working memory and perception operate interactively. For example, in previous studies researchers have suggested that sensory inputs matching the contents of working memory will have an automatic advantage in the competition for processing resources. The authors tested this hypothesis by…

The major purpose of this study was to examine bimodal coordination of featural stimuli in infancy. Specifically of interest was infant sensitivity to the auditory and visual combinations that characterize male and female stimulus configurations. A total of 27 male and 27 female subjects of 3, 6, and 9 months of age participated in the study.…