Past research has uncovered a surprising paradox: Although 14-month-olds have exquisite phonetic discrimination skills (e.g., distinguishing [b] from [d]), they have difficulty using phonetic detail when mapping "novel" words to objects in laboratory tasks (confusing "bin" and "din"). While some have attributed infants' difficulty to immature word…

The neurodevelopmental sequelae of early deprivation were examined by testing (N = 132) 8- and 9-year-old children who had endured prolonged versus brief institutionalized rearing or rearing in the natal family. Behavioral tasks included measures that permit inferences about underlying neural circuitry. Children raised in institutionalized…

This study investigated perception of audiovisual sequences in 3- and 4-month-old infants. Infants were habituated to sequences consisting of moving/sounding or looming/sounding objects and then tested for their ability to detect changes in the order of the objects, sounds, or both. Results showed that 3-month-olds perceived the order of 3-element…

Lexical priming was assessed in children with reading disability (RD) and in age-matched controls (M= 11.5 years), in visual and auditory lexical decision tasks. In the visual task, children with RD were found to have deficits in semantic (SHIP-BOAT), phonological/graphemic (GOAT-BOAT), and combined (FLOAT-BOAT) priming. The same pattern of…

Two experiments investigated infants' perception of silence in the speech contrast between the words "slit" and "split." Experiment I was designed to determine whether infants could discriminate a speech contrast cued primarily by silence duration. Experiment II studied whether infants can discriminate brief durations of…

In these two studies, neonatal oculomotor behavior was observed under various conditions of visual and auditory stimulation. Findings showed auditory and visual perception to be relatively independent during the neonatal period. (Author/JMB)

Infants were tested for their discrimination of changes in the melodic contour (direction of successive pitch changes) of brief melodies in the context of discernible variations in key or interval size. (PCB)

Findings demonstrate a finer partitioning of auditory space near midline than in hemifields. Discusses implications for an understanding of the development of auditory processing mechanisms in sound localizations. (RH)

The meaning of mothers' perceptions of their infants' temperamental "difficultness" was explored in three ways. Subjective ratings were elicited from mothers who listened to the cries of four- to six-month-old infants who were not their own. Acoustic properties of the cries of the infants were measured and effects of a variety of…

In two experiments, the majority of 21 newborn infants who were maintained in an alert state consistently turned their heads toward a continuous sound source presented 90 degrees from midline. For most infants, this orientation response was rather slow, taking median latencies of 2.5 seconds to begin and 5.5 seconds to end. (JMB)

The role of memory factors in the vowel discrimination of normal and at-risk 8-week-old infants was examined by studying the categorical versus continuous discrimination of very brief vowels in a nonnutritive sucking paradigm. Discrimination of the silent delay interval between the last familiar and the first novel stimulus was also examined.…

Compared the ability of poor and good readers in the second grade to make same-different matches of visual, auditory, and visual-auditory stimuli. (JMB)

Examines the relation between aspects of the fundamental frequency (basic pitch) of 16 infant newborn cries and 28 multiparous mothers' perceptions of those cries. Results support the hypothesis that increases in fundamental frequency are related to increases in maternal perceptions of the intensity of the infant's cry. (Author/RWB)

Studies development of auditory temporal acuity in 56 children aged 6 to 12 years and in 8 adults. Improvement in temporal acuity with age was attributed to development of sensory processes and not to age-related changes in nonsensory factors. (Author/BE)

Assessed auditory temporal acuity among infants of 3, 6, and 12 months of age and adults. Gap detection thresholds were quite poor in infants. Effects of restricting the range of frequencies available for detecting gaps were qualitatively similar for infants and adults. (GLR)