Used a semantic and morpho-syntactic priming paradigm to examine at which processing stage the advantage of blind adults may arise. Concludes that the faster speech comprehension skills of blind adults may originate from a more efficient perceptual analysis rather than from a more extended use of semantic or morpho-syntactic context information.…

Findings from a study in which twins were given tests of onward repetition and auditory processing are discussed. Children with specific language impairments were impaired on both measures, but deficits had different origins. Auditory processing problems showed no evidence of genetic influence, whereas the nonword repetition deficit was highly…

The auditory word gating paradigm was used to examine the quality of the underlying phonological representations in dyslexic and average readers. Although dyslexic children showed age-related nonword and rapid naming deficits, they did not differ from the age-matched controls in the amount of acoustic-phonetic input required to identify sets of…

Phoneme identification with audiovisually discrepant stimuli is influenced by information in the visual signal (the McGurk effect). Additionally, lexical status affects identification of auditorily presented phonemes. The present study tested for lexical influences on the McGurk effect. Participants identified phonemes in audiovisually discrepant…

Situated in the context of learning second language (L2) pronunciation, this article discusses from information-processing and pedagogical perspectives the role of repetitive practice with L2 input and of explicit focus on its form-related (phonological) properties. First, we report the results of an auditory word-priming experiment with 60 L2…

This study presents an empirical investigation of basic processes in the perception of speech sounds. The experimental methods applied have their roots in two different psycholinguistic research paradigms; i.e., "categorical perception" and "dichotic listening." In the categorical perception paradigm, listeners' categorization…

Examined the processing of speech and nonspeech sounds by 23 reading-disabled children. Children were required to identify and report the order of pairs of stimuli. Children had difficulty with very brief tones and stop consonant syllables at short interstimulus intervals. (SAK)

In this project, the hypothesis of an auditory temporal processing deficit in dyslexia was tested by examining auditory processing in relation to phonological skills in two contrasting groups of five-year-old preschool children, a familial high risk and a familial low risk group. Participants were individually matched for gender, age, non-verbal…

A study employed computational and experimental methods to address a number of issues related to the representation and structural organization of spoken words in the mental lexicon. Using a computerized lexicon consisting of phonetic transcriptions of 20,000 words, "similarity neighborhoods" for each of the transcriptions were computed.…

One of a series of semiannual reports, this publication contains 12 articles which report the status and progress of studies on the nature of speech, instrumentation for its investigation, and practical applications. The titles of the articles and their authors are as follows: "Coarticulatory Organization for Lip-rounding in Turkish and…

Assesses the relationship between production deficits and speech perception abilities. A categorical perception paradigm was administered to a group of communication disordered children and to a matched control group. Group results are tentatively interpreted as showing a moderate perceptual deficit in the communication disordered children of this…

Discusses two auditory comprehension studies that investigated the role of focus, as conveyed by a pitch accent, in the comprehension of relative clauses preceded by a complex noun phrase. Findings include focus attracts modifiers, and pitch accents for new phrases differ acoustically from pitch accents for contrastive phrases. (46 references)…

Reviews phoneme monitoring studies from 1969 to 1996 and groups them in terms of issues addressed with the task, including the contribution of the lexicon to speech perception, processing complexity, attention, contribution of prosodic information, and the basic unit of speech perception. Identifies and highlights task demands and artifactual…

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,…

Sequences of notes contain several different types of pitch cues, including both absolute and relative pitch information. What factors determine which of these cues are used when learning about tone sequences? Previous research suggests that infants tend to preferentially process absolute pitch patterns in continuous tone sequences, while other…