Asserts the importance of empathy as a necessary condition for health service professionals. Describes classroom techniques and assignments that teach and assess empathic-listening skills. Includes students' ratings of 14 learning activities designed to enhance listening skills and empathy. (CFR)

Delineates the effect of attentional bias on preadolescents' dichotic listening performance by using four different types of stimulus material (words, digits, CV syllables, and melodies) under free recall and directed attention conditions. (HOD)

Two experiments investigate children's knowledge about attentional capacity limits. Preschool children aged three and four years are asked to choose whether they will listen to pairs of stories simultaneously or one at a time. Results demonstrate a preference for listening to one at a time. (Author/RWB)

Elementary teachers participating in the study thought of music listening as a separate activity and not as one that permeated all music instruction. Assigned listening was utilized mostly in singing, in the playing of instruments, and in traditional music appreciation lessons where students were asked to listen to a recording. (Author/RM)

Critiques an investigation of the possibility of applying a Neo-Piagetian task to music. Contends that the task could be used as a criterion measure in determining a developmental sequence for auditory pitch discrimination. Details the Neo-Piagetian positions that make Piaget's theory more compatible with current cognitive psychology trends. (LS)

This study, involving 40 normal-hearing 6 year olds, substantiates the form equivalence of the Selective Auditory Attention Test. Analysis shows equal mean difficulty and significant correlations between lists in quiet and between lists presented with competing speech. (Author/JDD)

The use of cues to voicing perception of initial stop consonants in multiple spoken syllables was studied for moderately/severely hearing impaired (N=43) and normal-hearing listeners (N=12). Results confirmed that voice onset time was a strong voicing cue for both hearing impaired and normal hearing listeners. (Author/DB)

Two experiments investigated the perception of coarticulatory cues by 10 college age adults in the speech of 9 children with profound hearing loss and 9 children with normal hearing. Overall, listeners were able to identify vowels in productions by both groups though the patterning of vowel identification differed for the two speaker groups in…

Research studies have pointed to a similarity between reading and listening that may imply that listening to writing is likely to be a useful means of evaluating it. Therefore a study was designed to determine the extent to which holistic scores assigned to student essays by readers correlate with holistic scores assigned to the same essays by…

The study examined the sensitivity of young children (3-7 years old) and adults to the acoustic variations resulting from a speaker's coarticulation (or coproduction) of phonetic segments. Results indicated perceptual sensitivity to certain coarticulatory effects present as early as three years of age. (Author/DB)

The study evaluated the degree of accuracy with which three groups of listeners (all speech language pathologists) could use perceptual analysis alone for identification of the following specific dysarthria types: flaccid, spastic, ataxic, hypokinetic, hyperkinetic chorea, hyperkinetic dystonia, and mixed. Listeners demonstrated minimal success in…

This study, with 26 normal hearing subjects, investigated the development of temporal resolution as a function of frequency region, using a modified masking period pattern model. Results indicated that temporal resolution improves with age, with improvement for low frequencies continuing beyond age 10 but high frequency improvement approaching…

Speech recognition threshold (SRT) was measured in quiet and in noise for normal hearing subjects and subjects with high frequency sensorineural hearing loss. The speed, reliability, and apparent sensitivity of the SRT to frequency response characteristics make it a potentially useful tool for hearing aid evaluation. (Author/DB)

The study with three adult stutterers evaluated the effects of instructions to rate and modify the naturalness of their speech and compared their self evaluations with evaluations of listeners. (Author/DB)

Mildly mentally retarded adolescents (N=14) and mental age-matched nonretarded children participated in three experiments examining language processing efficiency. Results suggested that the retarded and nonretarded differ in the speed with which the semantic-analytic processes are executed but not necessarily the phonological encoding processes…