The schema hypothesis proposed by Kagan and Lewis was used to make predictions concerning the preferences of infants 3 to 14 months old for speech stimuli. An operant response method was used in determining the infants' preferences for inflected, monotone, and scrambled natural speech stimuli. (MS)

Under conditions of serial recall of auditorily presented lists of digits, recall of the last item has been shown to be adversely affected by the presence of a redundant item following the list. It is shown that the size of this effect, the suffix effect, is not influenced by the phonological complexity of the suffix. (Editor/RK)

A new procedure for estimating the dichotic ear advantage is applied for the first time in conjunction with the single-response requirement. Most subjects showed unusually large right-ear advantages, making the present methodology interesting for the study of hemispheric asymmetry. (Editor)

The rate of speaking in words per minute is a function of three independent variables, namely, articulation rate and the number and durations of pauses. The present study varies each of these components separately in a factorial design in order to determine how the listener combines them into a global impression of speech rate. (Editor)

Notes that phonemic restoration is a powerful auditory illusion. Points out that when part of an utterance is replaced by another sound, listeners perceptually restore the missing speech. Several paradigms measure this illusion and explore its bottom-up and top-down bases. Findings reveal that acoustic properties of the replacement sound strongly…

Effects on the event-related potential (ERP) waveform of differences in stimuli (task difficulty) and threshold were studied with 35 undergraduates performing a visual inspection time task and 30 performing a pitch discrimination task. In both tasks, ERP differences related to threshold were temporally localized differences in waveform shape. (SLD)

Used a semantic and morpho-syntactic priming paradigm to examine at which processing stage the advantage of blind adults may arise. Concludes that the faster speech comprehension skills of blind adults may originate from a more efficient perceptual analysis rather than from a more extended use of semantic or morpho-syntactic context information.…

Forty second-graders, 20 good and 20 poor readers, completed a /ba/-/da/ temporal order judgment (TOJ) task. The groups did not differ in TOJ when /ba/ and /da/ were paired with more easily discriminated syllables. Poor readers' difficulties with /ba/-/da/ reflected perceptual confusion between phonetically similar syllables rather than difficulty…

Investigated the relationship between auditory temporal processing of nonspeech sounds and phonological awareness ability in 8- to 12-year-olds with a reading disability, placed in groups based on performance on Tallal's tone-order judgment task. Found that a tone-order deficit did not relate to performance on order processing of speech sounds, to…

Tasks assessing perception of auditory temporal and nontemporal cues were administered to children with reading disorders (RD) with or without attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or with ADHD alone. The presence of RD was associated only with a deficit in detection of a tone onset time synchrony. The presence of ADHD was associated with a…

This study compared the speech-in-noise perception abilities of children with (n=63) and without (n=36) learning disabilities (LD) when either speaking style (conversational vs. clear) or signal-to-noise ratio was varied. Children with LD had poorer overall sentence-in-noise perception. The clear speech condition was sufficient to improve some LD…

Findings from a study in which twins were given tests of onward repetition and auditory processing are discussed. Children with specific language impairments were impaired on both measures, but deficits had different origins. Auditory processing problems showed no evidence of genetic influence, whereas the nonword repetition deficit was highly…

Eighteen adult listeners assessed whether stuttering samples were authentic or simulated. Results support the concepts that the production of stuttered and nonstuttered speech disruptions are experienced as being qualitatively different; only stutterers can validly recognize the difference, and only when it occurs; stuttering is a…

Psychometric functions (PFD) for the detection of pure tones were obtained from 10 adolescent and young adult listeners with normal hearing and 10 adult listeners with sensorineural impairments of presumed cochlear origin. The slopes of the PFDs were abnormally steep in some of the hearing-impaired listeners but were statistically significant only…