Four papers on perceptual processes, by (1) W. Ahlbrand; (2) E. Elenbogen, S. Sperry and G. A. Thompson; (3) B. Randhawa; and (4) T. Sticht and D. Glasnapp, which were presented at the 55th annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, are critiqued here. Emphasis is upon the relevance of the papers to issues in perceptual…

We investigated how different psychophysical procedures affect frequency discrimination performance in children. Four studies used a design in which listeners heard two tone pairs and had to identify whether the first or second pair contained a higher frequency target tone. Thresholds for 6-and 7-year-olds were higher than those for 8- and…

Several studies have begun to investigate the claim that children can make most phonological discriminations when they begin to speak. This paper investigates how well children aged 2;3 to 2;11 can discriminate between pairs of minimally different real words, and it shows that the results are affected by how well the children know the words. It is…