Since speech is a continuous stream with no systematic boundaries between words, how do pre-verbal infants manage to discover words? A proposed solution is that they might use the transitional probability between adjacent syllables, which drops at word boundaries. Here, we tested the limits of this mechanism by increasing the size of the word-unit…

Two experiments involving a total of 177 infants 8 to 11 months of age found that subjects used a global processing strategy like adults' in discriminating transformations of a six-tone melody. Subjects needed melodic contour and frequency range to judge new sequences, but, in easy tasks, they also used absolute frequency. (CB)

Auditory pattern recognition skills in children with reading disorders were investigated using perceptual tests involving discrimination of frequency and duration tonal patterns. A behavioral test battery involving recognition of the pattern of presentation of tone triads was used in which individual components differed in either frequency or…