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)

The contribution that attentional factors, listener biases, and other nonsensory variables make to stimulus dominance in a dichotic listening task was assessed by comparison of scores obtained in a conventional two-ear monitoring task and a yes/no target-monitoring task. Results suggested that nonsensory factors had little influence in determining…

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…

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)

Twelve hearing-impaired and eight normal-hearing adults listened to speech and music programs that were reproduced using five different frequency responses (one flat, the others combinations of reduced lower frequencies and/or increased higher frequencies). Most preferred was a flat response at lower frequencies and a 6dB/octave increase…

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)

Listeners judged whether they heard a terminal fall, rise, or a flat final intonation contour in 9 sentences produced by 8 deaf children, aged 8-18. The more slowly the contour fell, the more likely listeners were to perceive the contour as flat, regardless of the amount by which it fell. (Author/JDD)

Twenty-one normal hearing college students were presented with non-time-gated and time-gated speech stimuli. Findings indicated that poorer accuracy and longer isolation points were observed at lower signal presentation levels, listener confidence at isolation point was only indirectly influenced by presentation level, and monosyllabic word…

This study investigated ratings of amplified speech quality characterized by peak clipping, a common form of distortion in hearing aids, with eight college students having moderate/severe hearing losses. Both clipping level and interaction of the frequency-response shaping with clipping level significantly affected perceived speech quality. A…

The study examined the preferences of listeners of both sexes in four age groups with regard to natural and computer generated synthetic speech in six different contexts. Children preferred to have computers produce synthesized speech, while adults preferred computers with more natural-sounding voices. (DB)

This study evaluated whether listeners can distinguish human brainstem auditory evoked responses elicited by acoustic clicks from control waveforms obtained with no acoustic stimulus when the waveforms are presented auditorily. Detection performance for stimuli presented visually was slightly, but consistently, superior to that which occurred for…