A shadowing paradigm was used to determine the extent to which subjects could comprehend a spoken message without allocating attention or awareness to it. The paradigm involved presenting subjects with a control passage describing neutral events and an experimental passage describing embarrassing events over an unattended auditory channel.…

Effects on the event-related potential (ERP) waveform of differences in stimuli (task difficulty) and threshold were studied with 35 undergraduates performing a visual inspection time task and 30 performing a pitch discrimination task. In both tasks, ERP differences related to threshold were temporally localized differences in waveform shape. (SLD)

In four experiments, evidence was found for a complex psychological representation of musical pitch. The perception of music depends not only on psychoacoustic properties of the tones, but also on processes that relate the tones to one another through contact with a well-defined and complex psychological representation of musical pitch. (Author/RD)

Several experiments involving 150 college students and adults provide evidence for top-down lexical to phonemic activation in auditory word processing. Results indicate that lexical activation can cause the perceptual process to synthesize a highly functional phonemic code. (SLD)

Two experiments, a shadowing task and a mispronunciation-detection task, were performed to investigate the interactions between the data-driven primary speech perception process and the knowledge-driven word recognition process in the comprehension of continuous speech. Results are applied to an active direct access model of word recognition.…

This study of 94 college undergraduates, including 24 with a reading disability, found that speech perception was strongly related to 3 of 4 phonological variables, including short-term and long-term auditory memory and phoneme segmentation, which were in turn strongly related to reading. Nonverbal temporal processing was not related to any…

A study was conducted to determine the degree of relationship between eye movement patterns and cognitive mapping as determined by the Cognitive Style Mapping Instrument (CSMI). It was hypothesized that a high correlation exists between a predominance of visual and auditory eye movement patterns and the visual and auditory cognitive mapping styles…

Major findings of this study involving undergraduate music majors showed that the variables of language-bound/language-optional and field dependence/field independence significantly affect aural skill learning. The relationship of reflection/impulsivity to achievement in aural skills was found to be negligible. (Author/RM)

The study of the performance of 55 learning-disabled college students on the Raven's Progressive Matrices and other tasks found: (1) a negative correlation between visual-motor skills and written language, (2) a positive correlation between visual organization/memory and mathematics, and (3) a positive correlation between auditory memory and…

Presents 44 entries from a modern composer and music professors' journal, culled from 1993 to the present. Includes comments and criticisms of composers and musicians, as well as philosophical and practical observations. (MJP)