Two same/different discrimination tasks were performed by amateur-musician subjects in this functional magnetic resonance imaging study: Melody Discrimination and Harmony Discrimination. Both tasks led to activations not only in classic working memory areas--such as the cingulate gyrus and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex--but in a series of…

Purpose: It has been reported that children and adults weight differently the various acoustic properties of the speech signal that support phonetic decisions. This finding is generally attributed to the fact that the amount of weight assigned to various acoustic properties by adults varies across languages, and that children have not yet…

We describe the case of a child ("S") who was treated with radiation therapy at age 5 for a recurrent malignant brain tumor. Radiation successfully abolished the tumor but caused radiation-induced tissue necrosis, primarily affecting cerebral white matter. "S" was introduced to us at age 15 because of her profound dyslexia. We assessed cognitive…

This article describes the characteristics of patrons with learning disabilities (LD) and how these characteristics might affect library use. The lack of services for college patrons who have learning disabilities (LD) in this decade is much like the lack of adequate and appropriate services for high school patrons with LD in previous decades. The…

Investigation supported by Public Health Service Research Grant NB-0-7346 from the National Institute of Mental Health and Grant OEG-3-6-062063-1559 from the U.S. Office of Education.

In these two studies, neonatal oculomotor behavior was observed under various conditions of visual and auditory stimulation. Findings showed auditory and visual perception to be relatively independent during the neonatal period. (Author/JMB)

A high-amplitude sucking procedure, with synthesized female speech, was used to ascertain the effects of fundamental frequency, amplitude, and duration on discrimination of polysyllabic sequences. Results suggest that the exaggerated suprasegmentals of infant-directed speech may function as a perceptual catalyst, focusing the infant's attention on…

Infants were tested for their discrimination of changes in the melodic contour (direction of successive pitch changes) of brief melodies in the context of discernible variations in key or interval size. (PCB)

Ten kindergarteners with no known communication problems were given 10 sets of the "Repetition Task," a procedure used to assess auditory perception, over a span of 5 days. Results suggest the possibility that differences between dysphasic and normal children on the "Repetition Task" may result from differences in perceptual learning. (Author/CL)

Success of cross-modal matching with subjects as young as four years old suggests that it is possible to investigate intermodal organization in young children. (RH)