Categories are fundamental to everyday life and the ability to learn new categories is relevant across the lifespan. Categories are ubiquitous across modalities, supporting complex processes such as object recognition and speech perception. Prior work has proposed that different categories may engage learning systems with unique developmental…

Recent studies have established that even infants can determine what others know based on previous visual experience. In the current study, we investigated whether 2-and 3-year-olds know what others know based on previous auditory experience. A child and an adult heard the sound of one object together, but only the child heard the sound of another…

Our native tongue influences the way we perceive other languages. But does it also determine the way we perceive nonlinguistic sounds? The authors investigated how speakers of Italian, Turkish, and Persian group sequences of syllables, tones, or visual shapes alternating in either frequency or duration. We found strong native listening effects…

This study investigates children's metarepresentational competence (MRC) with regard to listening to and making sense of simple sonic stimuli. Using diSessa's (2002) seminal work on MRC in mathematics and sciences as background, it aims to assess the relative importance children attribute to several criteria for representational adequacy…

Purpose: The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the new Cognitive Spare Capacity Test (CSCT), which measures aspects of working memory capacity for heard speech in the audiovisual and auditory-only modalities of presentation. Method: In Experiment 1, 20 young adults with normal hearing performed the CSCT and an independent battery of…

This paper describes research on newborns' responses to music. Video observation and electroencephalogram (EEG) were collected to see whether newborns' responses to random sounds differed from their responses to music. The data collected were subjected to both qualitative and quantitative analysis. This paper will focus on the qualitative study,…

Maturational changes in the capacity to process quickly the temporal envelope of sound have been linked to language abilities in typically developing individuals. As part of a longitudinal study of brain maturation and cognitive development during adolescence, we employed dense-array EEG and spatiotemporal source analysis to characterize…

Intersensory redundancy can facilitate animal and human behavior in areas as diverse as rhythm discrimination, signal detection, orienting responses, maternal call learning, and associative learning. In the realm of numerical development, infants show similar sensitivity to numerical differences in both the visual and auditory modalities. Using a…

Infants who were in darkness were presented with objects that made sounds. Objects were within reach and out of reach. Infants reached into the target area more often when the object was in reach than when the object was beyond reach. Infants reached correctly in the dark for objects placed off midline. (BC)

Compared the mismatch-negativity (MMN) component of auditory event-related brain potentials to explore the relationship between phonological short-term memory and auditory-sensory processing in 7- to 9-year olds scoring the highest and lowest on a pseudoword repetition test. Found that high and low repeaters differed in MMN amplitude to speech…

Five studies examined the contributions of syllable-ordering and rhythmic properties of syllable strings to 6- and 9-month-old infants' speech segmentation. Results indicate that the capacity for integrating multiple sources of information in speech perception emerges between 6 and 9 months, in rough synchrony with the emergence of integration in…

The perceptual-linguistic stimulus distinction for auditory stimuli was examined with 35 trainable and severely retarded (age 8 to 20) and 31 nonretarded (age 3 to 5) students. Retarded and nonretarded students performed similarly on auditory-perceptual stimuli. Nonretarded students performed significantly better than did retarded students on…

Extends dynamic attending theory to developmental questions concerning tempo and time hierarchies. Compares performance of 4- to 10-year-olds, and adults on dynamic attending activities. Suggests that growth trends could be expressed in terms of listeners' engagement of slower attending oscillators with age and musical experience, accompanied by…

In the present work, we developed a database of nonlinguistic sounds that mirror prosodic characteristics typical of language and thus carry affective information, but do not convey linguistic information. In a dichotic-listening task, we used these novel stimuli as a means of disambiguating the relative contributions of linguistic and affective…

Elementary school students demonstrated a developmental trend in ability to judge speed solely on auditory cues. Second graders considered intensity cues relevant, and were most accurate on intensity shifts. Accuracy on frequency shifts increased across grades. Awareness of frequency and frequency-intensity relationships increased with age.…