Care-experienced young people face significant levels of mental distress yet the nature and lived reality of this is poorly understood and undermines the degree to which professional caregivers can provide effective support. This is exacerbated by the lack of 'voice' and control care-experienced young people have as active producers of knowledge…

This research examines the effect of repetition on melodic dictation tasks in an undergraduate ear-training class. A pilot group of freshman music majors (n = 17) were asked to notate four melodies, of which two were slightly more difficult since they contained more melodic leaps. Participants heard two melodies repeated three times and two other…

We developed a computerized audiovisual training programme for school-aged children with specific language impairment (SLI) to improve their phonological skills. The programme included various tasks requiring phonological decisions. Spoken words, pictures, letters and written syllables were used as training material. Spoken words were presented…

Central auditory processing disorder (CAPD), as defined by the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA), refers to difficulties in the perceptual processing of auditory information in the central nervous system and the neurobiological activity that underlies that processing and gives rise to electrophysiologic auditory potentials (ASHA,…

Purpose: Individuals with hearing loss engage in auditory training to improve their speech recognition. They typically practice listening to utterances spoken by unfamiliar talkers but never to utterances spoken by their most frequent communication partner (FCP)--speech they most likely desire to recognize--under the assumption that familiarity…

Purpose: Although traditional study of auditory training has been in controlled laboratory settings, interest has been increasing in more interactive options. The authors examine whether such interactive training can result in short-term perceptual learning, and the range of perceptual skills it impacts. Method: Experiments 1 (N = 37) and 2 (N =…

Introduction: As the number of people with visual impairments (that is, those who are blind or have low vision) is continuously increasing, rehabilitation and engineering researchers have identified the need to design sensory-substitution devices that would offer assistance and guidance to these people for performing navigational tasks. Auditory…

Training can improve perceptual sensitivities. We examined whether the temporal dynamics and the incidental versus intentional nature of training are important. Within the context of a birdsong rate discrimination task, we examined whether the sequencing of pretesting exposure to the stimuli mattered. Easy-to-hard (progressive) sequencing of…

While the prevalence of autism continues to increase, there is a growing need for techniques that facilitate teaching this challenging population. The use of visual systems and prompting has been prevalent as well as effective; however, the use of auditory systems has been lacking in investigation. Ten children between the chronological ages of 4…

Learning nonnative speech contrasts in adulthood has proven difficult. Standard training methods have achieved moderate effects using explicit instructions and performance feedback. In this study, the authors question preexisting assumptions by demonstrating a superiority of implicit training procedures. They trained 3 groups of Greek adults on a…

Learning a second language as an adult is particularly effortful when new phonetic representations must be formed. Therefore the processes that allow learning of speech sounds are of great theoretical and practical interest. Here we examined whether perception of single formant transitions, that is, sound components critical in speech perception,…

We examined the effect of perceptual training on a well-established hemispheric asymmetry in speech processing. Eighteen listeners were trained to use a within-category difference in voice onset time (VOT) to cue talker identity. Successful learners (n = 8) showed faster response times for stimuli presented only to the left ear than for those…

Differences in the delayed recall performance of auditory stimuli that were linguistic-meaningful (words), linguistic-nonmeaningful (nonsense syllables), nonlinguistic-meaningful (environmental sounds), and nonlinguistic-nonmeaningful (pure tones) were evaluated with 20 normal and 20 learning disabled children 5 to 9 years of age. (Author/DB)

Three experiments studied the perception of tone sequences. Ratings of perceived structure and ease of recognition in transposition were both influenced by harmonic progression, the contour, and the excursion or repetition pattern within the sequence. Results are described in terms of the abstraction and analysis of levels of pitch relations.…

Pavlovian stimuli can markedly elevate instrumental responding, an effect known as Pavlovian-instrumental transfer (PIT). As the role of the ventral tegmental area (VTA) in PIT is yet unknown, we examined the effects of transient VTA inactivation by direct microinjections of a mixture of the GABA[subscript A] and GABA[subscript B] receptor…