Used data from infants in operant head-turning procedure to examine effects of structure and redundancy of speech context on discovery of two target syllables. Clustering strategy, which presupposes basic element of perception and aggregates these elements to form units, may complement bracketing strategy, which presupposes endpoint cues and…

Two studies explored the relationship between rapid auditory processing and phonological processing in 82 typical children and compared 17 children with dyslexia to controls. Children with dyslexia performed at a level similar to reading-age controls on auditory processing but obtained scores that were significantly below those of the…

Considering Jakobson's theory that speech disorders involve defects in paradigmatic or in syntagmatic operations, and that these two categories result in different defects, this question was examined: does the syntagmatic group suffer from defects not only in contextual generation of active speech but also in comprehension of grammatical…

Development of the ability to classify auditory patterns was studied at grades 2, 6, 10, and 12 and at adult age levels. Both accuracy and feature use in classification were consistent across age; the age changes that did occur appeared to be due to differences in perception rather than process. (JMB)

Research is reported in which subjects were required to perceive sentences in noise. A series of sentences having the same syntax and rhythm was presented. On a final sentence either rhythm alone or rhythm plus syntax were changed. The results stress the importance of rhythm in speech perception. (Author/RM)

Reports on research into perceptuo-motor control in a converse experimental situation, in which subjects were required to utter a repetitive sequence of syllables immediately prior to identifying syllables presented auditorily. Results support the notion of a unitary mechanism that processes information about certain consonant features during…

Using dichotic listening methodology, 25 musicians and 25 nonmusicians were compared on four cerebral lateralization tasks: melodies, tonal patterns, rhythm patterns, and verbal stimuli. Musicians demonstrated superior performance on the music tasks. Results are interpreted in terms of superior cognitive strategies of musicians as a function of…

This study examined phonological processing in 30 less-skilled third-grade readers, 30 younger children at the same reading level, and 30 more-skilled age mates. The less-skilled readers had significantly lower accuracy scores than both age mates and younger normal readers on word span, word-pair repetition, tongue twister, and, especially,…

This study evaluated the peripheral and central auditory functioning (and thus the potential to perceive obstacles through reflected sound) of eight totally blind persons and eight sighted persons. The blind subjects were able to process auditory information faster than the control group. (Author/DB)

Twenty-three children (ages 10 to 12) with language impairment and 46 typically achieving adults participated in two auditory lexical-decision tasks evaluating effects of phonological opacity on word recognition. Findings indicated that the language-impaired children were less able than controls to identify phonologically opaque…

Examined abilities of 3- to 16-year olds and adults to resist interference during the processing of two auditory dimensions of speech--the speaker's gender and spatial location. Found that the degree of interference from irrelevant variability in either dimension did not vary with age. In the presence of conflicting task-irrelevant information,…

A novel effect is reported in which serial recall of visual digits was disrupted to a greater degree by the presence of the same set of digits presented as an irrelevant auditory sequence than by the presence of irrelevant auditory consonants, but only when the order of the irrelevant digits was incongruent with that of the to-be-remembered digits…