Recorded the pattern of crying in neonates who were responding to natural infant cries, synthetic cries, and silence. (GO)

Investigates the effect of target size and presence, intensity, and location of sound on the visual following of infants one and two months of age. (Author/RH)

A go/no-go conditioned head-turn paradigm was used to examine the abilities of 6- and 12-month-olds to discriminate changes in temporal grouping and their perception of absolute and relative timing information when listening to patterns of white-noise bursts. (Author/RH)

Using signal detectability theory, analysis was performed on auditory frequency sensitivity data obtained by Hutt et al, 1968, on human neonates. Reanalysis using 12 male infants confirms superiority of lower frequencies and square waves in provoking startles in neonates. No state of arousal effects were found on sensitivity. (JH)

Results from one experiment indicated that the temporal pattern and spectral complexity of moderately intense auditory stimuli influenced cardiac responses in 24 alert newborns. A second study extended the temporal-pattern effect to other vowel stimuli in a no-delay discrimination paradigm. (Author/RH)

An adaptive up/down tracking procedure was used in combination with a visually reinforced head-turn response to examine infants' (6 to 18 months of age) auditory sensitivity for 500-, 2000-, and 8000-Hz tone bursts. Six-month-olds were significantly less sensitive to the 8000-Hz tone than to either lower frequency; older infants demonstrated…

To test whether six-month-old infants recognize the auditory similarity of speech sounds sharing a value on a phonetic-feature dimension, an operant head turn procedure was used. Results indicated that the performance of infants trained on phonetically related speech sounds was far superior to that of infants in the nonphonetic control group.…

Two experiments used a visual habituation paradigm to examine infants' categorical discrimination of the medial stop consonants /aba/ and /apa/. Results provided evidence of infant categorical discrimination based solely on closure duration. Infants shifted their boundary toward shorter closure durations if they received pulsing during…

Findings demonstrate a finer partitioning of auditory space near midline than in hemifields. Discusses implications for an understanding of the development of auditory processing mechanisms in sound localizations. (RH)

It is commonly observed that "tone deaf" individuals are unable to hear the beat of a tune, yet deficits on simple timing tests have not been found. In this study, we investigated rhythm processing in nine individuals with congenital amusia ("tone deafness") and nine controls. Participants were presented with pairs of 5-note sequences, and were…

A detection-theoretic analysis of the auditory localization of dual-impulse stimuli is described, and a model for the processing of spatial cues in the echo pulse is developed. Although for over 50 years "echo suppression" has been the topic of intense theoretical and empirical study within the hearing sciences, only a rudimentary understanding of…

Why females generally perform better on language tasks than males is unknown. Sex differences were here identified in children (ages 9-15) across two linguistic tasks for words presented in two modalities. Bilateral activation in the inferior frontal and superior temporal gyri and activation in the left fusiform gyrus of girls was greater than in…