Determined how proficiently children identify gender of adults and children, based on whispered and phonated vowels. Compares performance with adult listeners. Both groups obtained simiiar average rates of accuracy when identifying gender based on preadolescent children's phonated vowels. Adults were more accurate when perceiving whispered vowels.…

Both good and poor readers stored information indicating whether a word was heard or seen and information concerning a word's category membership. (Author)

The study investigated the prevalence of middle ear effusion (conductive hearing loss) in 32 school aged children found to have auditory learning disabilities. Results indicated a systematic relationship between auditory learning disability and middle ear effusion. (DB)

Eight sets of paired auditory and visual stimuli were constructed. Each member of the auditory pair was matched by one member of the visual pair (e.g., ascending "tone/up arrow"; descending "tone/down arrow"). Sixty-one infants with a mean age of 11.4 months were presented matching and unmatching stimuli; total fixation time…

This brief overview on dyslexia notes the problems of defining this syndrome, presents a profile of a "typical" dyslexic child, and describes the three sub-types of dyslexia which have been identified. (SJL)

Investigated three acoustical features of word boundaries between French nouns and adjectives. Found that fundamental frequency, duration, and intensity all appeared to be acoustical correlates of word boundaries. Indicated that the temporal structure of the speech material was the most important cue for the detection of the word boundaries.…

Shows that vowel duration is a cue to voicing of syllable-final consonants. Notes that the effective duration of a vowel apparently extends over all parts of the acoustic signal, including the transitions reflecting the consequences of the coarticulation of vowel and consonant. (Author/RL)

Investigates the effect of a recorded male human voice on neonate head, eye, mouth and crying behaviors. Vocal Stimulation enhanced head movement, eye opening, mouthing and crying and influenced hand sucking. Differences between breast fed and bottle fed babies were found for mouth orientation, hand sucking and crying. (RH)

Presents a music educator's guide to selecting audio equipment. Tells what to look for when choosing speakers, amplifiers, cartridges, turntables, and tapedecks. Charts are used as guides for price ranges and a glossary of terms that will be encountered in audio showrooms. (Editor/RK)

Words presented with regular acoustic onsets are not "perceptually" regular. The requirements for perceived regularity were investigated, and the "perceptual center" (P-center) of a word was defined as its psychological moment of occurrence. (Editor)

Notes that in phonetic categorization, listeners hear a range of speech sounds forming a continuum of ambiguous sounds between two endpoints and are required to identify the sounds as one or other of the endpoints. Points out that this task has been used in phonetics and in psycholinguistics to study categorical perception, selective adaptation,…

Administered phonological awareness and phoneme identification tasks to dyslexic children and chronological age (CA) and reading-level (RL) comparison groups. Found no real differences in categorical perception between dyslexic and RL groups; however, more dyslexics (7 of 25) had abnormal identification functions. Results suggest that some…

"Sine-wave speech" sentences contain only four frequency-modulated sine waves, lacking many acoustic cues present in natural speech. Adults with (n=19) and without (n=14) dyslexia were asked to reproduce orally sine-wave utterances in successive trials. Results suggest comprehension of sine-wave sentences is impaired in some adults with…

The commentary to EC 232 373 and EC 232 374 discusses whether stuttering is really what the listener perceives, the stutterer senses, or the dictionary states. It concludes that stuttering can probably be defined in appropriate contexts as any or all of these three things. (JDD)

This paper examines the case for modality specificity as a criterion for improving the specificity of diagnosing central auditory processing disorders. Demonstrating the modality-specific nature of sensory processing deficits is seen as one way to rule out nonperceptual factors as explanations for observed dysfunction. (Author)