Three experiments examined the effects of selected factors of interval size, timbre, loudness, and length of the melodic pattern on children's ability to perceive, the motion of 2- and 3-pitch melodic patterns. Subjects for all experiments were 32 second- and 32 fifth-grade children. The task for each experiment consisted of identifying the motion…

This study explored three aspects of the 2-month-old's perception of multisyllabic utterances. Questions addressed were: (1) Do infants perceive phonetic contrasts occurring either in the initial (Bada-Gada) or medial (Daba-Daga) positions of multisyllabic utterances; (2) Are infants more likely to perceive these contrasts in stressed as opposed…

This study investigated the possibility of a functional relation between the auditory and visual systems in the human newborn beyond reflexive organization. Visual activity was monitored in 16 newborns through the use of infrared corneal reflection video tape recording. Infants were observed in total darkness and while monocularly viewing a…

This status report on speech research includes 16 essays and extended reports. Included are "Perspectives in Vision: Conception of Perception?""The Perception of Speech,""The Dynamic Use of Prosody in Speech Perception,""Speech and the Problem of Perceptual Constancy,""Coperception,""Dichotic 'Masking' of Voice Onset Time,""The Number Two and the…

The effects of certain procedures as part of the curriculum in early childhood on the perceptual readiness of children exposed to it are explored. The procedures include: (1) the testing of each child to determine perceptual strengths and weaknesses; (2) the development of "learning print" for each child: a description of integrities and deficits…

In training people to perform auditory identification tasks (e.g., training students to identify sound characteristics in a sonar classification task), it is important to know whether or not training procedures are merely sustaining performance during training or whether they enhance learning of the task. Often an incorrect assumption is made that…

The language of the deaf has only recently become an area of concern for linguists. Of special interest are questions of the systematicity of deaf speech (is it systematic or idiosyncratic and none-rule-governed?) and the nature of its deviation from the speech of hearing people. The study presented here is an effort on the part of linguists,…

This monograph is a collection of papers describing a series of loosely related studies of visual attention, auditory stimulation, and language discrimination in young infants. Titles include: (1) Infant Attention and Discrimination: Methodological and Substantive Issues; (2) The Addition of Auditory Stimulation (Music) and an Interspersed…