Findings confirmed that newborns turn toward laterally presented sounds, habituate with repetition, recover to novel sounds, and extend demonstrations of recovery to discrepant stimuli. Recovery was found to be a curvilinear function of degree of discrepancy. Newborns systematically turned away from redundant stimuli. (RH)

Examines the development of a computational model of auditory grouping processes informed by psychoacoustic experimentation. The experimental theme was to quantify the contribution of grouping principles, rather than simply to demonstrate their existence. This article demonstrates the importance of avoiding prespecified procedures for grouping…

Examines the importance of canonical syllables in early speech perception as well as production. A study, using the discrimination learning method, tested 20 infants (mean age 51 hours) and 20 controls for their ability to discriminate between members of syllable pairs that were either canonical or noncanonical. Differences in reactions are…

Three experiments tested whether four-day-old infants can discriminate multisyllabic utterances on the basis of the number of syllables or the number of phonemes. The results provided no evidence that infants were sensitive to a change in number of phonemic constituents. (MDM)

Tests second- to sixth-grade children with normal reading efficiency under three conditions of simultaneous amplified auditory feedback on reading aloud nouns and nonwords. Finds that right ear feedback improved reading accuracy in the first three grades. Finds no effect in fifth grade whereas in sixth grade, left ear feedback improved only the…

Studies evaluating temporal auditory processing among individuals with reading and other language deficits have yielded inconsistent findings due to methodological problems (Studdert-Kennedy & Mody, 1995) and sample differences. In the current study, seven auditory masking thresholds were measured in fifty-two 7- to 10-year-old children (26…

The relation between reading ability and performance on an auditory temporal pattern discrimination task was investigated in children who were either good or delayed readers. The stimuli in the primary task consisted of sequences of tones, alternating between high and low frequencies. The threshold interstimulus interval (ISI) for discrimination…

In 4 studies, 7.5-month-olds used synchronized visua-lauditory correlations to separate a target speech stream when a distractor passage was presented at equal loudness. Infants succeeded in a segmentation task (using the head-turn preference procedure with video familiarization) when a video of the talker's face was synchronized with the target…

A perceptual learning experiment provides evidence that the mental lexicon cannot consist solely of detailed acoustic traces of recognition episodes. In a training lexical decision phase, listeners heard an ambiguous [f-s] fricative sound, replacing either [f] or [s] in words. In a test phase, listeners then made lexical decisions to visual…

Previous research has suggested that persons with mental retardation evidence equivalence more readily after being trained on auditory-visual than on visual-visual match-to-sample tasks. The present study sought to determine if this discrepancy is also apparent in normally capable preschoolers and whether the derived class-consistent test…

Freezing to a tone following auditory fear conditioning is commonly considered as a measure of the strength of the tone-shock association. The decrease in freezing on repeated nonreinforced tone presentation following conditioning, in turn, is attributed to the formation of an inhibitory association between tone and shock that leads to a…

Sound-symbolism is the idea that the relationship between word sounds and word meaning is not arbitrary for all words, but rather that there are subsets of words in the world's languages for which sounds and their symbols have some degree of correspondence. The present research investigates sound-symbolism as a possible route to the learning of an…

In 3 experiments, 3-month-old infants were trained to move an overhead mobile by kicking 1 of their feet in the presence of a distinctive visual (crib bumpers) and auditory (music) context. In Experiment 1A, 5-day but not 1-day retention was disrupted if either or both elements of the context present during the retention test were novel. In…

Auditory evoked responses to a violin tone and a noise-burst stimulus were recorded from 4- to 6-year-old children in four repeated measurements over a 1-year period using magnetoencephalography (MEG). Half of the subjects participated in musical lessons throughout the year; the other half had no music lessons. Auditory evoked magnetic fields…

A simple instance of coupling behavior to the environment is oscillating the hands in pace with metronome beats. This environmental coupling can be weaker (1 beat per cycle) or stronger (2 beats per cycle). The authors examined whether strength of environmental coupling enhanced the stability of in-phase bimanual coordination. Detuning by…