Infants who were in darkness were presented with objects that made sounds. Objects were within reach and out of reach. Infants reached into the target area more often when the object was in reach than when the object was beyond reach. Infants reached correctly in the dark for objects placed off midline. (BC)

Compared the mismatch-negativity (MMN) component of auditory event-related brain potentials to explore the relationship between phonological short-term memory and auditory-sensory processing in 7- to 9-year olds scoring the highest and lowest on a pseudoword repetition test. Found that high and low repeaters differed in MMN amplitude to speech…

Two experiments examined 8-month-olds' use of absolute and relative pitch cues in a tone-sequence statistical learning task. Results suggest that, given unsegmented stimuli that do not conform to rules of musical composition, infants are more likely to track patterns of absolute pitches than of relative pitches. A third experiment found that adult…

Two experiments used phoneme counting tasks to investigate the foundations of phonemic awareness. Found that first graders and college students had some ability to distinguish between monophthongs (as in "he") and diphthongs (as in "how"), and they tended to count fewer "sounds" for syllables ending with the more…

Describes two studies in which young children were shown pictures that represented sound with postures and contexts, with conventions, and with combinations of information. Shows that the different types of pictorial representation of sound were not equivalent in their ability to evoke a correct interpretation. (HOD)

A series of possible explanations for learning disabilities (LDS) couched in terms of information processing capabilities was tested by comparing the performance of LDS children on several types of information processing tasks with that of a control group. Subjects were 28 LDS children (10-11 years old) and 24 elementary school students of the…

In three amplitude discrimination experiments involving a backward masking task, children's rate of perceptual processing was compared to that of adults. Developmental differences in discrimination were compensated for by increases in the psychophysical difference between test tones. No developmental differences in rate of perceptual processing…

Describes observer-based technique for assessing auditory capacities of infants from three to 12 months of age. This technique, referred to as the Observation-based Psychoacoustic Procedure (OPP), combines features of the Forced-choice Preferential Looking Technique and of the Visual Reinforcement Audiometry. Pure-tone detection and frequency…

Investigates how feedback from a listener helps kindergarteners attend to message quality and how such feedback affects speaking and listening skills. Results indicate that kindergarteners learn to assess message adequacy by observing listeners flounder with inadequate messages.(Author/AS)

Tested three competing structural equation models concerning auditory inspection time (AIT) and cognitive ability. Found that auditory inspection times near age 11 correlate most strongly with later high IQ. (ET)