A study examined perceptual-weighting strategies and performance-audibility functions of 11 children with moderate hearing impairments (HI), 11 age-matched peers, 11 adults with moderate HI, and 11 typical adults. Results showed both hearing sensitivity and age effects. Listeners with HI required lower levels of audibility to achieve similar…

Two experiments used a magnitude estimation paradigm to test whether perception of disfluency is a function of whether the speaker and the listener stutter or do not stutter. Utterances produced by people who stutter were judged as "less fluent," and, critically, this held for apparently fluent utterances as well as for utterances…

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.…

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)

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…

The fundamental physical concepts needed in any appreciation of acoustical problems are discussed by a scientist and an architect. The major areas of interest are--(1) the nature of sound, (2) the behavior of sound in rooms, (3) the design of rooms for speech, (4) the design of rooms for music, (5) the design of studios, (6) the design of high…

Paper read at the annual meeting of the Chinese Language Teachers Association held in conjunction with ACTFL (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) on November 26, 1971, in Chicago, Illinois. (DS)

Eighty college students with learning disabilities were evaluated via intelligence tests and auditory language tests. In the 63 students with auditory language problems, persistent problems were discovered in discrimination, comprehension, memory, retrieval, sequencing, syntax, formulation, and articulation. The major area of language problems was…

This study evaluated the ability to process auditory temporal-envelope cues in six children with dyslexia and two groups of six each normal control children and adults. Children with dyslexia showed poorer reception of voicing, manner, and place of articulation for unprocessed speech and poorer reception of voicing for "speech-envelope noise."…

Many researchers have stressed that the acoustic environment is crucial to the speech perception, academic performance, attention, and participation of students in classrooms. Classrooms in highly urbanised locations are especially vulnerable to noise, a major influence on the acoustic environment. The purpose of this investigation was to…

This study demonstrates that listeners use lexical knowledge in perceptual learning of speech sounds. Dutch listeners first made lexical decisions on Dutch words and nonwords. The final fricative of 20 critical words had been replaced by an ambiguous sound, between [f] and [s]. One group of listeners heard ambiguous [f]-final words (e.g.,…

The results of three projects concerned with auditory word recognition and the structure of the lexicon are reported in this paper. The first project described was designed to test experimentally several specific predictions derived from MACS, a simulation model of the Cohort Theory of word recognition. The second project description provides the…

Reports on three experiments that investigated why young children's perceptions of bimodal speech are less influenced by the visual component of speech than adults' perceptions are. Results argue in favor of the explanation that children are poorer lipreaders than adults. (HOD)