The roles of spectro-temporal coherence, lexical status, and word position in the perception of speech in acoustic signals containing a mixture of speech and nonspeech sounds were investigated. Stimuli consisted of nine (non)words in which either white noise was inserted only into the silent interval preceding and/or following the onset of vocalic…

Recent studies reveal that naming has powerful conceptual consequences within the first year of life. Naming distinct objects with the same word highlights commonalities among the objects and promotes object categorization. In the present experiment, we pursued the origin of this link by examining the influence of words and tones on object…

Auditory stream segregation (or streaming) is a phenomenon in which 2 or more repeating sounds differing in at least 1 acoustic attribute are perceived as 2 or more separate sound sources (i.e., streams). This article selectively reviews psychophysical and computational studies of streaming and comprehensively reviews more recent…

In 4 chronometric experiments, influences of spoken word planning on speech recognition were examined. Participants were shown pictures while hearing a tone or a spoken word presented shortly after picture onset. When a spoken word was presented, participants indicated whether it contained a prespecified phoneme. When the tone was presented, they…

Synthetic speech stimuli which varied along a continum defined in terms of the relative onset time of the first formant and which are characteristically associated with the phonemes /do/ and /to/ were presented to two groups of subjects for labelling. The stimuli presented to each group were identical except for a one-step shift on the stimulus…

This study tested the effects of moderately intense square-wave tone on the nutritive sucking pattern of neonates. (Author/SB)

Results suggest that temporal summation of brief stimuli is deficient in neonates. When compared with adult data from an analogous study, results also suggest that the transient system is immature in infants and that this immaturity is expressed in different ways by startle amplitude, probability, and latency. (PCB)

The form of the cardiac reaction to the novel stimulus was regarded as support for an attentional interpretation of cardiac deceleration. (Author)

This study examined the effects of cochlear hearing loss on the ability to discriminate increments in the duration of a stimulus under conditions where the frequency and/or amplitude of the stimulus change dynamically. Three stimulus types were used: pure tones, frequency-modulated tones, and narrow bands of noise. The carrier/center frequency of…

In face-to-face conversation speech is perceived by ear and eye. We studied the prerequisites of audio-visual speech perception by using perceptually ambiguous sine wave replicas of natural speech as auditory stimuli. When the subjects were not aware that the auditory stimuli were speech, they showed only negligible integration of auditory and…

Young adults with a history of specific language impairment (SLI) differ from reading-impaired (dyslexic) individuals in terms of limited vocabulary and poor verbal short-term memory. Phonological short-term memory has been shown to play a significant role in learning new words. We investigated the neural signatures of auditory word recognition…

Despite being one of our most important and most often used modalities, listening is an area of language instruction that is often overlooked by teachers and researchers alike as fertile ground for the enhancement of students' vocabulary knowledge. For low-level learners, especially those not in full control of the first 2000 most-frequent words…

Two experiments examined whether text composition engages verbal, visual, and spatial working memory to different degrees. In Experiment 1, undergraduate students composed by longhand a persuasive text while performing a verbal, visual, or spatial concurrent task that was presented visually. In Experiment 2, participants performed a verbal or…