Compared 24 educable mentally retarded (EMR) adolescents, 24 chronological age (CA) matched nonretarded adolescents, and 24 mental age (MA) matched children in same-different decision task in which dyadic sequences were presented within and across visual and auditory modalities. Results supported concept of greater visual dominance by retarded and…

The relationships between reading comprehension level, digit span, and short-term memory for Morse code-like temporal patterns were investigated. College students performed better when the first pattern was auditory. No relationship for college or fifth-grade students was found between digit span and accuracy in comparing patterns of tones.…

The effect of educational television background music on selective exposure and information acquisition was studied. Background music of slow tempo, regardless of its appeal, had negligible effects on attention and information acquisition. Rhythmic, fast-tempo background music, especially when appealing, significantly reduced visual attention to…

Studied the ability of 9-, 12-, and 14-year-old dyslexics to recall auditorily presented letter strings. The children showed a normal phonemic confusibility effect, although overall their recall was much poorer than chronological age controls; their recall levels were similar to those of their reading age controls. (Author)

Examines reinforcing characteristics of attachment agents such as mothers and blankets among 100 preschool-age children. The first study assesses preferences for these agents in two-choice situations, the second study examines the effectiveness of the agents as visual reinforcers, and the third study focuses on the reinforcing capacity of the…

A sample of school children, ages 7-11, was given a range of short-term memory tests to determine whether recall was optimised by aural or by visual stimuli presentation. Results showed that for both sexes and for each age group aural presentation was consistently superior to visual. (Author)

The study was designed to determine the effects of increased stimulation on the hyperactive behavior of three profoundly retarded boys (mean age 14 years). The results of the study indicated that increased stimulation was effective in reducing the Ss' hyperactive behavior. (Author)

Notes that few phonemes exhibit greater variance in the membership of phonemes that make up an equivalency class than the phoneme represented by /r/. Points out that the relationship between the auditory features of the speech signal and phonetic classification provides insight into a language's encoding and decoding system. (23 references)…

Administered temporal order judgment and discrimination tasks to children with reading disabilities (RD), with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, with both disorders, or with neither. Found that RD children showed no specific sensitivity to the interstimulus interval and performed worse than non-RD children on speech but not nonspeech…

Five young adult females with mild mental retardation were given match-to-sample training to develop four classes of equivalent stimuli. All subjects demonstrated development of all possible equivalence classes involving these stimuli. For four of five subjects, the classes that included auditory stimuli developed more rapidly than those that did…

The study compared the effectiveness of using the Sonicguide, a device using echoes to aid orientation and mobility, with five blind children aged 5-48 months. Results found that children at all age levels were able to use the guide. These results conflict with previous results suggesting a critical age for device usefulness. (DB)

The hypothesis that tactile presentation of voice fundamental frequency is as effective as auditory presentation in aiding speechreading was proven through auditory stimulation experiments, psychophysical studies, phonetic-level tactile studies, and sentence-level studies. After training with the device, three postlingually deafened adults…

Ninety-six fifth-grade students studied a map of a fictitious island while twice listening to a related narrative with target feature and nonfeature items, cued by varying iconic and verbal stimuli in four map cue conditions. Memory for feature information and pictorial retrieval cues appeared to activate memory for nonfeature information. (SLD)

Describes The Audio Interactive Tutor (TAIT), an interactive audio/oral computer-assisted study device. TAIT's output consists of explanations and examples along with commands and questions requiring responses from the user. It uses speech recognition to determine the responses made by the user and constructs an evolving model of what the user…

Reviews studies in which perceptual cue trading data have been compared with computational models and examines the perception of contrast between the voiceless fricative "s" and the voiceless affricate "ts." Nine subjects listened to a total of 6 tokens each of 193 stimuli and labeled each stimulus as containing either of the…