Developmental aspects of auditory cognition were investigated in 5-to-10-year-old children (n = 100). Musical and verbal short-term memory (STM) were assessed by means of delayed matching-to-sample tasks (DMST) (comparison of two four-item sequences separated by a silent retention delay), with two levels of difficulty. For musical and verbal…

Task-irrelevant speech impairs short-term serial recall appreciably. On the interference-by-process account, the processing of physical (i.e., precategorical) changes in speech yields order cues that conflict with the serial-ordering process deployed to perform the serial recall task. In this view, the postcategorical properties (e.g., phonology,…

The mechanisms underlying the poorer serial recall of talker-variable lists (e.g., alternating female-male voices) as compared with single-voice lists were examined. We tested the novel hypothesis that this "talker variability effect" arises from the tendency for perceptual organization to partition the list into streams based on voice…

Twenty-four children (ages 6-10) with language impairment (LI) and 22 without participated in a study of discrimination, identification, and serial ordering of highly dissimilar and similar vowels. Children with LI were less accurate in several tasks and were found to experience auditory perception deficits which led to less robust central…

A testing instrument, the Experimental Phoneme Sequence Test (EPST), was devised to collect baseline information for studying receptive knowledge of phoneme sequencing in normal articulating kindergarten and elementary school children. One hundred kindergarten through fourth-grade children, five male and five female subjects at each half-year…

The results of three experiments provide evidence that the observed detrimental effects of acoustic similarity on serial recall may be a consequence of poorer memory for the order of consonant sounds as opposed to vowel sounds. (PMJ)

This study examined the abilities of adult listeners to discriminate and identify temporal order of sounds presented in tonal sequence. Listeners had either normal hearing or mild to moderate sensorineural hearing losses. In general, older listeners performed more poorly than younger listeners on the discrimination and identification tasks. Order…

In 2 experiments, the authors tested whether the classical modality effect--that is, the stronger recency effect for auditory items relative to visual items--can be extended to the spatial domain. An order reconstruction task was undertaken with four types of material: visual-spatial, auditory-spatial, visual-verbal, and auditory-verbal.…

Forty-eight grade-three children and 48 grade-eight children were presented respectively with six- and eight-letter sequences for written free recall. The older children, as had adult subjects in previous studies, showed a greater tendency to recall serially with a four-letters-per-second presentation rate than with a half- or…