Purpose: Listening is the gateway to learning in the mainstream classroom; however, classrooms are noisy environments, making listening challenging. Therefore, speech-in-noise tests that realistically incorporate the complexity of the classroom listening environment are needed. The aim of this article was to review the speech stimuli, noise…

This book is relevant for language testers, listening researchers, and oral proficiency teachers, in that it explores four broad themes related to the assessment of L2 listening ability: the use of authentic, real-world spoken texts; the effects of different speech varieties of listening inputs; the use of audio-visual texts; and assessing…

This book brings together current thinking on informal language learning and the findings of over 30 years of research on captions (same language subtitles for the deaf and hard-of-hearing) to present a new model of language learning from captioned viewing and a future roadmap for research and practice in this field. Language learners may have…

Infants five and seven months of age participated in two studies in which two filmed facial expressions were presented with a single vocal expression characteristic of one of the facial expressions. Seven- , but not five-month-olds, increased their fixation to a facial expression when it was sound-specified. Preferences for a particular expression…

A profile analysis procedure was used with the Carrow Auditory-Visual Abilities Test to aid in the identification of systematic modality preferences in two preschool children with articulation disorders. Critical values are identified to facilitate the identification of the child's strengths and weaknesses at the subtest level. (Author/DB)

To investigate sensory dominance in early development, a series of studies examined six-month-old infants' processing of multisensory stimulus compounds. Findings indicated that infants discriminated changes in the temporal characteristics of the auditory component but not in the visual component. This and other findings suggested that auditory…

Involving 10-month-old infants, a series of studies examined responses to temporally modulated compound auditory-visual stimuli. Findings indicated that, although the auditory modality can dominate the visual modality at 10 months of age, the visual modality can process temporal information when the temporal relationship of the information in the…

A series of three experiments was conducted to assess the comprehension of four types of cross-modal (synesthetic) similarities in children and adults. Both perceptual and verbal (metaphoric) modes were tested. (PCB)

Examines, in two experiments, 5-month-old infants' sensitivity to auditory-visual specification of distance and direction of movement. One experiment presented two films with soundtracks in either a match or mismatch condition; the second showed the two films side-by-side with a single soundtrack appropriate to one. Infants demonstrated visual…

This study evaluated whether listeners can distinguish human brainstem auditory evoked responses elicited by acoustic clicks from control waveforms obtained with no acoustic stimulus when the waveforms are presented auditorily. Detection performance for stimuli presented visually was slightly, but consistently, superior to that which occurred for…

This study examined the effects of the cochlear hearing loss of 12 adults on two measures of sequential processing that rely on spectro-temporal information: a gap-detection discrimination task and a melody recognition task. It was concluded that cochlear hearing loss deleteriously affects the processes underlying perceptual organization of…

This study compared speech intelligibility for sentences spoken either conversationally or in a clear manner under three conditions: auditory only, visual only, and audiovisually. Overall, in each condition, speech intelligibility improved significantly for the tokens of clear speech. Some interaction between speaker and manner of speech was…

Earlier research (Thorson, et al., 1976) found that latencies increase for acoustically confusable letter pairs and decrease for visually confusable letter pairs as a positive function of interstimulus interval (ISI). To extend these findings to different age groups, 30 young adults (mean age, 21.4 years) and 30 older adults (mean age, 68.8 years)…

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)

This study compared children with either attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) (n=24), reading disability (RD) (n=33), both (n=9), or controls. Children with ADHD were characterized by difficulty with a visual search task whereas children with RD had difficulty with an auditory processing task. Specifically, children with ADHD…