Two experiments were conducted to examine whether abrupt onsets are capable of reflexively capturing attention when they occur outside the current focus of spatial attention, as would be expected if exogenous orienting operates in a truly automatic fashion. The authors established a highly focused attentional state by means of the central…

Purpose: To examine perceptual deficits as a potential underlying cause of specific language impairments (SLI). Method: Twenty-one children with SLI (8;7-11;11 [years;months]) and 21 age-matched controls participated in categorical perception tasks using four series of syllables for which perceived syllable-initial voicing varied. Series were…

Several auditory processing deficits have been reported in children with dyslexia. In order to assess for the presence of a binaural integration type of auditory processing deficit, dichotic listening tests with digits, words and consonant-vowel (CV) pairs were administered to two groups of right-handed 11-year-old children, one group diagnosed…

Background: Many popular educational programmes claim to be "brain-based", despite pleas from the neuroscience community that these neuromyths do not have a basis in scientific evidence about the brain. Purpose: The main aim of this paper is to examine several of the most popular neuromyths in the light of the relevant neuroscientific and…

This study investigated whether task instructions affect sound-isolation performance. The effects of phoneme class and phoneme position were also assessed. Two hundred Dutch kindergartners were presented with a free-sound-isolation task and its constrained counterparts: an initial-, a middle-, and a final-sound-isolation task. All tasks contained…

This study examined the speech perception, speech, and language developmental progress of 25 children with hearing loss (mean Pure-Tone Average [PTA] 79.37 dB HL) in an auditory verbal therapy program. Children were tested initially and then 21 months later on a battery of assessments. The speech and language results over time were compared with…

Patients with lesions of the left hemisphere often suffer from oral-facial apraxia, apraxia of speech, and aphasia. In these patients, visual features often play a critical role in speech and language therapy, when pictured lip shapes or the therapist's visible mouth movements are used to facilitate speech production and articulation. This demands…

Behavioral and electrophysiological processing of sequential tones were investigated in reading delayed (RD) and non-reading delayed (NRD) children matched on intelligence and reading level. NRD children performed consistently better on sequencing of tonal patterns. Middle latency event-related potentials from the RD group indicated reduced…

Pulsation threshold (PT) masking was used to assess frequency resolution among infants 3 and 6 months of age and adults. The masker intensity at which the pulsing probe becomes indistinguishable from a physically continuous probe is the PT. A measure of frequency resolution can be obtained by examining the effects of masker frequency on the PT. In…

This paper reports an investigation of gender-indicating acoustic properties of the vocalizations of 73 six- and seven-year-old speakers. Tape recorded samples of these children's isolated vowel and sentence productions were presented in four listening sessions. One hundred and sixteen young adult (age 17-24) female listeners made gender judgments…

The role of memory factors in the vowel discrimination of normal and at-risk 8-week-old infants was examined by studying the categorical versus continuous discrimination of very brief vowels in a nonnutritive sucking paradigm. Discrimination of the silent delay interval between the last familiar and the first novel stimulus was also examined.…

The study investigated perceptual preferences of five autistic children (mean age 10.6 years). Results indicated a weak (not statistically significant) preference for auditory musical stimuli over visual stimuli. Autistic children spent significantly more time than did normals with the musical stimulus. (Author/DB)