Background and aims: Fascinations for or aversions to particular sounds are a familiar feature of autism, as is an ability to reproduce another person's utterances, precisely copying the other person's prosody as well as their words. Such observations seem to indicate not only that autistic people can pay close attention to what they hear, but…

Purpose: Background noise and voice problems among teachers can degrade listening conditions in classrooms. The aim of this literature review is to understand how these acoustic degradations affect spoken language processing in 6- to 18-year-old children. Method: In a narrative report and meta-analysis, we systematically review studies that…

Purpose: Despite the apparent primacy of syntactic deficits, children with developmental language disorder (DLD) often also evidence lexical impairments. In particular, it has been argued that this population have difficulty forming lexical representations that are detailed enough to support effective spoken word processing. In order to better…

Hearing developmental dyslexics and profoundly deaf individuals both have difficulties processing the internal structure of words (phonological processing) and learning to read. In hearing non-impaired readers, the development of phonological representations depends on audition. In hearing dyslexics, many argue, auditory processes may be impaired.…

Fifteen years ago, Pascual-Leone and colleagues used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to investigate speech production in pre-surgical epilepsy patients and in doing so, introduced a novel tool into language research. TMS can be used to non-invasively stimulate a specific cortical region and transiently disrupt information processing. These…

Stating that the most pressing and puzzling scientific questions are questions about properties, not about change, the authors examine Piaget's and other theories of human development. Disputes the constructivist view that the initial cognitive state is one of emptiness, showing that from birth, humans react to certain stimuli in specific ways,…

Outlines an approach for studying auditory levels in speech perception, focusing on the artificial speech understanding system that is most compatible with the experimental data obtained in speech perception research. (RL)

Augments Michael Studdert-Kennedy's state-of-the-art report on speech perception research (EJ 227 656) with comments on categorical perception of speech and nonspeech stimuli, speech perception in context, the role of prosody, and development/impairments of speech perception. Includes a summary of a discussion on speech perception research. (RL)

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…

Summarizing research activities from January 1977 to September 1978, this is the fourth annual report of research on speech processing conducted in the Department of Psychology at Indiana University. The report includes extended manuscripts, short reports, progress reports, and information on instrumentation developments and software support. The…

Exploration of the role of listening comprehension in facilitating second-language learning includes discussion of the auditory perception of language, listening disadvantages for second-language learners, the need to concentrate on lexical knowledge rather than ear training, minimum word knowledge requirements, and lexical ignorance as a major…

Summarizing research activities from October 1978 to August 1979, this is the fifth annual report of research on speech processing conducted in the Department of Psychology at Indiana University. The report includes extended manuscripts, short reports, progress reports, and information on instrumentation developments and software support. The…

Summarizing research activities from January 1982 to December 1982, this is the eighth annual report of research on speech perception, analysis and synthesis conducted in the Speech Research Laboratory of the Department of Psychology at Indiana University. The report includes extended manuscripts, short reports, progress reports, and information…

Presents a language processing model that distinguishes four functional components of reading and listening: feature detection, primary recognition, secondary recognition, and rehearsal and recoding. Uses the model to describe and incorporate some recent research. (GT)

Research efforts to model speech perception in terms of a processing system in which knowledge and processing are distributed over large numbers of highly interactive--but computationally primative--elements are described in this report. After discussing the properties of speech that demand a parallel interactive processing system, the report…