Addressing the disparate levels of aural skills that students may have acquired through their daily musical experiences prior to formal schooling can be difficult. Placement tests within the Western classical musical tradition typically involve structural decoding and formal concepts of elementary music theory. In this manuscript, we discuss the…

The goal of research on how letter identity and order are perceived during reading is often characterized as one of "cracking the orthographic code." Here, we suggest that there is no orthographic code to crack: Words are perceived and represented as sequences of letters, just as in a dictionary. Indeed, words are perceived and represented in…

Presents the gating paradigm as it is used in spoken word recognition research. In this task, a spoken-language stimulus is presented in segments of increasing duration and subjects are asked to propose the word being presented and to give a confidence rating after each segment. The advantages and problems associated with this task are discussed.…

Describes two variants of the form-priming paradigm (direct and mediated form priming) and summarizes the results obtained with each. With both variants, participants are presented with a target, to which a response is required, preceded by a prime. (28 references) (Author/CK)

Notes that phonemic restoration is a powerful auditory illusion. Points out that when part of an utterance is replaced by another sound, listeners perceptually restore the missing speech. Several paradigms measure this illusion and explore its bottom-up and top-down bases. Findings reveal that acoustic properties of the replacement sound strongly…

Notes that the primary use of sequence monitoring has been to determine which linguistic units are involved in word recognition and how these units might differ across languages. The task involves presenting subjects with targets either congruent or incongruent with a linguistic unit in the target-bearing item. The article focuses on the…

Describes a new paradigm that may be appropriate for uncovering speech perceptual codes. Illusory words are detected by blending two dichotic stimuli. The paradigm's design allows for comparison of different speech units by the manipulation of the distribution of information between two inputs. (23 references) (Author/CK)

Spoken language comprehension requires the coordination of different subprocesses in time. After the initial acoustic analysis the system has to extract segmental information such as phonemes, syntactic elements and lexical-semantic elements as well as suprasegmental information such as accentuation and intonational phrases, i.e., prosody.…

Describes the cross-modal semantic priming paradigm, including its underlying rationale and the different tasks with which it is combined. Introduces the type of stimuli used and the dependent and independent variables typically manipulated; discusses the paradigm's main advantages and drawbacks; and considers its most important areas of…

Notes that speech intelligibility has traditionally been measured by presenting words mixed in noise to listeners for identification at different signal-to-noise ratios. The words are produced in isolation or in sequence contexts where the predictability of specific items can be varied. Emphasizes that the technique provides valuable data about…

This article suggests that the development of listening skills should extend to the "soundscape" of nonspeech acoustical information. It presents a model for effective aural processing, identifies categories of information obtained from nonverbal sound, and explores "ear-tuning" or listening exercises that use sound to glean…

Discusses "cued shadowing," during which subjects listen to pairs of words or sentences and repeat a target word signalled by a cue. Rapid semantic and grammatical priming effects have been observed with this technique, both with word and sentence contexts and at different positions within sentence contexts, in normal children and adults, and in…

Describes the different priming procedures and experimental variables used for gaining access to the nature of the lexical representation of morphological information and summarizes the experimental data collected across different languages. Notes that responses to a target word in auditory word recognition tasks can be facilitated when the word…

Reviews the syntactic priming task, a paradigm involving the presentation of a phrasal or clausal context, followed by the presentation of a target item for lexical decision or naming. Notes that response times are faster for targets syntactically congruent with the preceding context than for incongruent targets. Outlines how to administer this…

Notes that in a typical word monitoring paradigm, subjects monitor ongoing language input for a pre-designated target word and that independent variables include the nature and position of the target word and the context in which it is embedded. Also notes that forms of this task are suitable for studies with young children and with individuals…