Patients with cochlear implants have the ability to exercise auditory control over their own speech production and over the speech of others, which is important for the development of speech control. In the present investigation three groups of 10 subjects were compared. The groups comprised: (1) cochlear implant users, (2) profoundly deaf using…

Success of cross-modal matching with subjects as young as four years old suggests that it is possible to investigate intermodal organization in young children. (RH)

A popular theoretical account of developmental language and literacy disorders implicates poor auditory temporal processing in their etiology, but evidence from studies using behavioral measures has yielded inconsistent results. The mismatch negativity (MMN) component of the auditory event-related potential has been recommended as an alternative,…

Children 6- to 7- and 9- to 10-years-old listened to pairs of words presented dichotically to the left and right ear either simultaneously or in immediate succession. Results indicated that pragmatic, serial relations dominate younger children's semantic organization, whereas logical, hierarchical relations dominate older children's semantic…

This paper studied whether abnormal P3 amplitudes in PDD are a corollary of abnormalities in ERP components related to selective attention in visual and auditory tasks. Furthermore, this study sought to clarify possible age differences in such abnormalities. Children with PDD showed smaller P3 amplitudes than controls, but no abnormalities in…

Few studies have examined the ability of individuals with learning disabilities, in general, or with Down syndrome, specifically, to discriminate speech. The purpose of this study was compare the speech discrimination abilities of eight children with Down syndrome (aged 5.7 to 12.8 years) to seven nonverbal mental-age matched controls (aged 4.0 to…

This paper reports an investigation of gender-indicating acoustic properties of the vocalizations of 73 six- and seven-year-old speakers. Tape recorded samples of these children's isolated vowel and sentence productions were presented in four listening sessions. One hundred and sixteen young adult (age 17-24) female listeners made gender judgments…

Performance on a dichotic word task was examined with 15 articulatory-impaired children and 15 non-articulatory-impaired children (all between 5 and 9 years old). Results of presenting words under three conditions (free recall, directed right, and directed left) found no significant differences between groups on ear preference. (Author/DB)

Ten children (ages 12-16) with specific language impairments (SLI) and controls matched for chronological or language age were tested with measures of complex sound localization involving the precedence effect phenomenon. SLI children exhibited tracking skills similar to language-age matched controls, indicating impairment in their ability to use…

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)

Discusses a study comparing children's perception of temporal acoustic cues to that of adults. Subjects were asked to identify voiced or voiced CVC words with uniformly voiceless final obstruents but in which vowel duration was systematically varied. Results show that subject age and vowel duration of test stimuli affect identification processes.…

Twenty-four children (ages 6-10) with language impairment (LI) and 22 without participated in a study of discrimination, identification, and serial ordering of highly dissimilar and similar vowels. Children with LI were less accurate in several tasks and were found to experience auditory perception deficits which led to less robust central…

The study comparing perceptual judgments of speech disfluency by 20 mothers of either stuttering or normally fluent children found no appreciable differences between groups in their judgments. Both groups of mothers most frequently judged sound/syllable repetitions to be stuttered, followed by whole-word repetitions and broken words. (Author/DB)

Comparison of the auditory frequency resolving ability of preschool children, school-aged children, and adults found data from children as young as three-years-old that were qualitatively indistinguishable from adult data though threshold estimates from young children were more variable from run to run than from adults. Increasing age improved…

This investigation examined the response strategies and discrimination accuracy of adults and children (aged 5-10) as the ratio of same to different trials was varied across 3 conditions of an auditory discrimination task. All subjects changed response strategies depending on the ratio of same-to-different trials. (DB)