This experiment examined the accuracy with which newborn infants orient their heads toward a sound positioned off midline within hemifields. The study also evaluated newborns' ability to update the angle of their head turn to match a change in localization of an ongoing sound. Alert newborns were held in a supine position and presented a sound at…

Pulsation threshold (PT) masking was used to assess frequency resolution among infants 3 and 6 months of age and adults. The masker intensity at which the pulsing probe becomes indistinguishable from a physically continuous probe is the PT. A measure of frequency resolution can be obtained by examining the effects of masker frequency on the PT. In…

This study examined changes in infants' performance in detecting tones as a funtion of time. Stimuli were presented in blocks of fixed frequency and intensity, rather than in random order. The findings of earlier studies that an observer can reliably tell from a 1-month-old's behavior when a pure tone is being presented, and that reinforcement of…

Infants' use of auditory information in guiding their search behavior is examined in this study. The subjects were two groups of 9-month-old crawling infants. Group 1 consisted of 24 infants and Group 2 of 16 infants. The auditory stimuli was the mother's voice. Infants in both groups were initially positioned by their mothers behind a screen in a…

Twenty normal newborns, approximately 36 hours old, were tested using an auditory temporal conditioning paradigm which consisted of a slow rise, 75 db tone played for five seconds every 25 seconds, ten times. Responses to the tones were measured by instantaneous, beat-to-beat heartrate; and the test trial was designated as the 2 1/2-second period…

A forced-choice observer-based testing procedure was used to determine pure-tone hearing thresholds for 2- to 4-week-old infants. Stimuli were 500-ms tone bursts of 500, 1,000, or 4,000 Hz with 500-ms intervals between tone bursts. Stimuli were presented monaurally by means of an insert earphone. Each 15-s trial consisted of 5 tone bursts,…

This paper describes three experiments which demonstrated the presence of binaural perception abilities (the ability to use both ears) in 4-month-old but not in 2-month-old infants. All of the experiments employed a visual fixation habituation-dishabituation paradigm in which infants were given a series of visual fixation trials while binaural…

This paper describes two experiments conducted to replicate the reported findings (Entus, 1975) that infants demonstrate a right ear advantage in the perception of dichotically presented syllables. Using the non-nutritive sucking paradigm, 48 infants 1-3 months of age were presented with verbal stimuli contingent upon criterion level sucking.…

The purposes of this study are (1) to analyze learning ability in newborns using heart rate responses to auditory temporal conditioning and (2) to correlate these with measures on the Brazelton Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale. Twenty normal neonates were tested using the Brazelton Scale on the third day of life. They were also given a…

This study considered two questions about infants' perception of affective expressions: (1) Can infants distinguish between happiness and anger on the basis of facial motion information alone? (2) Can infants detect a correspondence between happy and angry facial and vocal expressions by different people? A total of 40 infants of 7 months of age…

In a previous study, subjects that heard a monaurally presented two-clause sentence immediately followed by a probe word (identical word recognition) were faster at recognizing the probe as a sentence word with their left ears than with their right ears. This result suggested that the right ear was particularly efficient at transforming…

In an attempt to address the issue of bimodal coordination of featural stimuli, the sensitivity of 3-month-old infants to the auditory and visual components of male and female stimulus configurations was examined. Measures were made of the infants' visual attention to a male or female face while they listened to a male voice, female voice, or to…

This paper describes the results of two studies of auditory processing in child aphasia, and their implication for understanding deviant language development. The term "aphasia" is discussed as it is used to describe adult and child language disorders. A first experiment on the auditory functioning in aphasic and nonaphasic children suggests that…

A study investigated connections between reading difficulties and short term memory processes in order to explore the psychological basis for some individual differences in reading comprehension skills. Drawing on previous research indicating that poor readers were inferior to normal ones in judging whether two patterns of long and short tones…

Language processing is the abstraction of meaning from a physical signal, such as a sequence of speech sounds. Processing a spoken message requires a series of transformations that begin with the acoustic signal arriving at the ears and end with meaning in the mind of the listener. The goal of this information-processing model is to describe how…