Four pigeons were trained in a procedure in which concurrent-schedule food ratios changed unpredictably across seven unsignaled components after 10 food deliveries. Additional green-key stimulus presentations also occurred on the two alternatives, sometimes in the same ratio as the component food ratio, and sometimes in the inverse ratio. In eight…

The effects of lexical context on phonological processing are pervasive and there have been indications that such effects may be modulated by attention. However, attentional modulation in speech processing is neither well documented nor well understood. Experiment 1 demonstrated attentional modulation of lexical facilitation of speech sound…

A popular theoretical account of developmental language and literacy disorders implicates poor auditory temporal processing in their etiology, but evidence from studies using behavioral measures has yielded inconsistent results. The mismatch negativity (MMN) component of the auditory event-related potential has been recommended as an alternative,…

This study compares effects of an early childhood instructional program--designed to develop auditory and visual perception skills by stressing differential diagnosis, prescriptive suggestions and concomitant procedures--with programs typically found in nursery schools. Treatment group consisted of twelve paired on intelligence, auditory and…

A forced-choice observer-based testing procedure was used to determine pure-tone hearing thresholds for 2- to 4-week-old infants. Stimuli were 500-ms tone bursts of 500, 1,000, or 4,000 Hz with 500-ms intervals between tone bursts. Stimuli were presented monaurally by means of an insert earphone. Each 15-s trial consisted of 5 tone bursts,…

Reports on research into perceptuo-motor control in a converse experimental situation, in which subjects were required to utter a repetitive sequence of syllables immediately prior to identifying syllables presented auditorily. Results support the notion of a unitary mechanism that processes information about certain consonant features during…

Research was conducted to investigate two general classes of human attention models, early-selection models which claim that attentional selecting precedes memory and meaning extraction mechanisms, and late-selection models which posit the reverse. This research involved two components: (1) the development of simple, efficient, computer-oriented…

The emotional states of an adult male American speaker, as reflected in 30 utterances, were evaluated by 12 subjects on nine 7-point semantic differential scales. The subjects also evaluated the utterances on similar scales for pitch, loudness, and speed. Significant correlations were found between some acoustic variables and the judgments of some…