We explored the amount and timing of temporal synchrony necessary to facilitate prenatal perceptual learning using an animal model, the bobwhite quail. Quail embryos were exposed to various audiovisual combinations of a bobwhite maternal call paired with patterned light during the late stages of prenatal development and were tested postnatally for…

Earlier research established that preschool children pay less attention to television that is sequentially or linguistically incomprehensible. The authors of this study determined the youngest age for which this effect can be found. One hundred and three 6-, 12-, 18-, and 24-month-olds' looking and heart rate were recorded while they watched…

The influence of listener's expertise and sound identification on the categorization of environmental sounds is reported in three studies. In Study 1, the causal uncertainty of 96 sounds was measured by counting the different causes described by 29 participants. In Study 2, 15 experts and 15 nonexperts classified a selection of 60 sounds and…

Recent neuroimaging research has shown that perceptual and conceptual processing share a common, modality-specific neural substrate, while work on modality switching costs suggests that they share some of the same attentional mechanisms. In three experiments, we employed a modality detection task that displayed modality-specific object properties…

The empirical literature on auditory imagery is reviewed. Data on (a) imagery for auditory features (pitch, timbre, loudness), (b) imagery for complex nonverbal auditory stimuli (musical contour, melody, harmony, tempo, notational audiation, environmental sounds), (c) imagery for verbal stimuli (speech, text, in dreams, interior monologue), (d)…

This study explored the causes of the reverse modality effect when learning from multimedia instruction. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups (visual text or spoken text). The findings revealed a reverse modality effect wherein that those studying visual text outperformed those studying spoken text on three assessments. Further…

Everyday experience affords us many opportunities to learn about objects through multiple senses using physical interaction. Previous work has shown that active motor learning of unisensory items enhances memory and leads to the involvement of motor systems during subsequent perception. However, the impact of active motor learning on subsequent…

As a result of young people frequently exposing themselves to loud sounds, researchers are advocating education about the risks of contracting tinnitus. However, how pupils conceive of and learn about the biological aspects of hearing has not been extensively investigated. Consequently, the aim of the present study is to explore pupils' learning…

A quasi-experimental action research with a pretest-posttest same subject design was implemented to determine if there is a different effect of the flash card method and the multisensory approach on kindergarteners' achievement in sight word recognition, and which method is more effective if there is any difference. Instrumentation for pretest and…

Learners frequently experience phonologically inconsistent input, such as exposure to multiple accents. Yet, little is known about the consequences of phonological inconsistency for language learning. The current study examines vocabulary acquisition with different degrees of phonological inconsistency, ranging from no inconsistency (e.g., both…

Mandarin Chinese and many other tonal languages use tones that are defined as specific pitch patterns to distinguish syllables otherwise ambiguous. It had been shown that tones carry at least as much information as vowels in Mandarin Chinese [Surendran et al., 2005]. Surprisingly, though, many speech recognition systems for Mandarin Chinese have…

This article investigated the relationship between age at onset of canonical babbling and audibility of amplified speech in children with hearing impairment. Thirteen children with severe-profound hearing impairment and two children with normal hearing participated in a longitudinal investigation of vocalization development. A nonconcurrent…

Although the dominant approach posits that developmental dyslexia arises from deficits in systems that are exclusively linguistic in nature (i.e., phonological deficit theory), dyslexics show a variety of lower level deficits in sensory and attentional processing. Although their link to the reading disorder remains contentious, recent empirical…

The present research explores young children's extension of novel labels to novel animate items. Three experiments were performed by means of the intermodal preferential looking (IPL) paradigm. In Experiment 1, after repeated exposure to novel word-object associations, 24- and 36-month-olds extend novel labels on the basis of shape similarity, in…

Infants are frequently exposed to music during daily activities, including free play, and while viewing infant-directed videotapes that contain instrumental music soundtracks. In Experiment 1, an instrumental music soundtrack was played during a live or televised demonstration to examine its effects on deferred imitation by 6-, 12-, and…