Natural language conversational samples were collected from hearing-impaired preschoolers who were either using cochlear implants, tactile aids, or hearing aids over a 33-month period. Children using cochlear implants increased their overall communicativeness, their breadth of functions, and their use of intelligible speech faster than other…

Analyzes the production and perception of illocutionary forms. Using a semantic neutralization procedure, the performance of children (5, 7, and 9 years old) and adults was compared in two experiments focusing on prosodic representations in production and perception tasks. (Author/JL)

Despite intensive work on language-brain relations, and a fairly impressive accumulation of knowledge over the last several decades, there has been little progress in developing large-scale models of the functional anatomy of language that integrate neuropsychological, neuroimaging, and psycholinguistic data. Drawing on relatively recent…

A screening instrument developed for this study measured the listening skills of 22 children in a kindergarten class. Children were found to be weak in four areas of listening: (1) auditory discrimination; (2) auditory perception; (3) following oral directions; and (4) listening comprehension. After these measures were administered, students…

To determine whether gender differences exist in paralinguistic perception, 31 male and 59 female college students listened to an audiotape on which emotions were conveyed through ambiguous verbal statements and then indicated their perceptions of the conveyed emotions. Statistical analyses of the student responses in relation to students'…

TEN EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSES RELATED TO THE CONTROL OF SPEECH PRODUCTION AND PERCEPTION WERE REPORTED. THE ANALYSES WERE CONCERNED WITH THE DIFFERENTIAL EFFECTS OF STIMULI AND REINFORCEMENTS ON SPEECH PRODUCTION AND THE DISCRIMINATORY PERCEPTION OF SPEECH. INITIAL SPECIFICATIONS WERE INCLUDED FOR A SPEECH AUTOINSTRUCTION DEVICE TO BE USED FOR…

The author states that phonetic symbolism is not a generalizable phenomenon but maintains that those interested in the status of a poem as a speech event need not totally discount or discredit such perceptions. In his discussion of the theories which ascribe meaning to vocal utterance--the two imitative theories, the onomatopoeic and the gestural,…

Seventeen children (ages 8-10) with hearing loss were tested on four types of tasks (speech perception, phonetic awareness, recall of word strings, and comprehension of sentences with complex syntax) and results were compared to controls. Subjects showed evidence of restricted access to acoustic information in the speech signal. (Contains…

This paper describes changes in speech perception performance of deaf children using cochlear implants, tactile aids, or conventional hearing aids over a three-year period. Eleven of the 13 children with cochlear implants were able to identify words on the basis of auditory consonant cues. Significant lipreading enhancement was also achieved with…

University students were the subjects of three experiments designed to determine the usefulness of elliptic speech in investigating the perception of the phonological structure of continuous speech. Five naturally spoken and five synthesized paragraphs were recorded in two different randomizations of phonological distortions and at two different…

Summarizing recent research on evaluative reactions toward Mexican American speech varieties, the paper obtained contrasting evaluative reactions for standard English versus standard Spanish, for standard English versus highly accented English, and for varying degrees of accented English. Anglo and Mexican American adolescents from a Chicago high…

Research is reviewed on auditory-visual speech perception of hearing-impaired individuals. The review focuses on: the effects of competing noise, filtering, age, stimulus and noise, and hearing loss on perceptual behavior; bisensory communication evaluation procedures; and remediation of bisensory perceptual problems through consonant recognition…

Problems related to the structure of the mental lexicon are considered. The single access assumption, the passive memory assumption, and the heterogeneous memory assumption are rejected in favor of the theory which assumes several active memories, each able to store expression based on only one homogenous set of abstract primitives. One lexicon…

Thirteen manuscripts and extended reports on the nature of speech, instrumentation for its investigation, and practical applications of research are presented in this status report on speech research for the period of July-December 1979. The topics dealt with include speech perception, children's memory for sentences and word strings in relation…

A study compared continuous discourse tracking rates in eight children (ages 8-14) with hearing impairments and eight typical children using three competing noise conditions: classroom noise, videotaped classroom activity, and combined noise and visual activity. Statistical analyses showed no significant differences among tracking rates due to the…