Tests the point of convergence of linguistic information from auditory and visual channels. Compares reaction times for auditory and visual stimuli consisting of sentences, syntactic nonsense strings, random words, and nonwords. Finds that listening and reading processing converge at the word level and that words processed aurally and visually…

Assessed development of auditory selective attention using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and behavioral measures. Subjects heard tones or consonant-vowel sequences to detect deviant targets. Found that Nd difference (ERP difference between unattended and attended standard) showed effect of selective attention. For both tones and…

Assessed infants' ability to anticipate temporally cued events by presenting trials in which an interesting event was paired with a noise, followed by trials in which the interesting event was omitted. Infants demonstrated anticipatory heart-rate responses to the interesting event and a change in response to the interesting event from general to…

Used data from infants in operant head-turning procedure to examine effects of structure and redundancy of speech context on discovery of two target syllables. Clustering strategy, which presupposes basic element of perception and aggregates these elements to form units, may complement bracketing strategy, which presupposes endpoint cues and…

Children's memory of single infant experience was evaluated. At 6.5 months, infants participated in study of reaching in light and dark for sounding object. Children repeated dark procedure in laboratory when they were either one year or two years older. Older children with infant experience reached and grasped the sounding object significantly…

A study, including research and practice notes by various authors, investigated whether extended training in an acoustically rich environment could enhance the spatial updating ability of 12 adults with congenital blindness. After training, the adults' distance perception from a home-base location and novel locations was superior to a sighted…

Used visual preference technique to examine infants' (mean age 14.8 months) comprehension of two novel words for images of novel objects. Found that infants looked preferentially at images that matched an auditory stimulus and that infants showed learning after about 12 presentations of new words. Results support previous demonstration of rapid…

Three groups of 10 children, ages 8-14 (with autism or receptive developmental language disorder or without disabilities), participated in event-related brain potential experiments. Results suggest that both clinical groups failed to fully process changes in stimulus intensity. Findings are discussed in terms of potential abnormalities in…

A study of two forms of the Auditory Reading Test with 53 elderly participants with normal or low vision and hearing found mild-to-moderate hearing loss did not reduce auditory reading rates as much as expected. Participants with low vision read as quickly using computers and natural speech as sighted participants. (Contains references.)…

A study investigated subjective judgments of clarity and intelligibility in 20 listeners in conditions in which speech was equated for predicted intelligibility but varied in bandwidth. Listeners produced clarity and intelligibility ratings for the same speech material and experimental conditions that were highly related but differed in magnitude.…

Three experiments assessed the extent to which statistical learning generates novel word-like units, rather than probabilistically-related strings of sounds. Found that 8-month-olds' listening preferences were affected by the context (English versus nonsense) in which items from the familiarization phase were embedded during testing. Confirmed…

Information presented concurrently and redundantly to 2 or more senses (intersensory redundancy) has been shown to recruit attention and promote perceptual learning of amodal stimulus properties in animal embryos and human infants. This study examined whether the facilitative effect of intersensory redundancy also extends to the domain of memory.…

Research indicates that attentional deficits exist in aphasic individuals. However, relatively little is known about auditory vigilance performance in individuals with aphasia. The current study explores reaction time (RT) and accuracy in 10 aphasic participants and 10 nonbrain-damaged controls during linguistic and nonlinguistic auditory…

This study examined the effects of three stimulus variables and background music on paired-associate learning of foreign language (FL) vocabulary. The stimulus variables were the frequency and concreteness of the native language (L1) words and the (phonotactical) typicality of the FL words. Sixty-four L1-FL pairs were presented for learning six…

In a first experiment, we recorded event-related-potentials (ERPs) to "the" followed by meaningful words (Story) versus "the" followed by nonsense syllables (Nonse). Left and right lateral anterior positivities (LAPs) were seen from the onset of "the"up to 200 ms in both conditions. Later than 200 ms following the onset of "the" the left and right…