Two experiments used both irrelevant speech and tones in order to assess the effect of manipulating the spatial location of irrelevant sound. Previous research in this area had produced inconclusive results (e.g., Colle, 1980). The current study demonstrated a novel finding, that sound presented to the left ear produces the greatest level of…

Following up on an earlier positron emission tomography (PET) experiment (Indefrey et al., 2001), we used a scene description paradigm to investigate whether a posterior inferior frontal region subserving syntactic encoding for speaking is also involved in syntactic parsing during listening. In the language production part of the experiment,…

Visual speech cues presented in synchrony with discrepant auditory speech cues are usually combined to a surprisingly clear unitary percept that corresponds with neither of the two sensory inputs (the McGurk illusion). This audiovisual integration process is commonly believed to be highly autonomous and robust to cognitive intervention, unlike the…

This study sought to investigate whether the abnormally small P3 amplitudes observed in pervasive developmental disorder (PDD) are related to differences in processing capacity. PDD children and adolescents and their control groups participated in the study. Visual probe stimuli were presented during an auditory task with two levels of difficulty.…

Prior exposure to drugs of abuse has been shown to occlude the structural plasticity associated with living in a complex environment. Amphetamine treatment may also occlude some cognitive advantages normally associated with living in a complex environment. To test this hypothesis we examined the influence of prior exposure to amphetamine on fear…

Five experiments investigated the recognition of proper names and common nouns using the lexical decision paradigm. In Experiments 1-3 the case of the initial letter of written stimuli was systematically varied. An advantage was consistently found for proper names written with the first letter in capital. Crucially, response times to proper names…

The ability to discriminate the spectral shapes of complex sounds is critical to accurate speech perception. Part of the difficulty experienced by listeners with hearing loss in understanding speech sounds in noise may be related to a smearing of the internal representation of the spectral peaks and valleys because of the loss of sensitivity and…

We measured the relationships between choice stimulus modalities and three basic discriminations (visual, visual matching-to-sample, and auditory-visual) using the Assessment of Basic Learning Abilities test. Participants were 9 adults who had moderate to profound developmental disabilities. Their most and least preferred leisure activities,…

Based on converging evidence that visual and olfactory images are key components of food cravings, the authors tested a central prediction of the elaborated intrusion theory of desire, that mutual competition between modality-specific tasks and desire-related imagery can suppress such cravings. In each of Experiments 1 and 2, 90 undergraduate…

The nonword repetition (NWR) test has been shown to be a good predictor of children's vocabulary size. NWR performance has been explained using phonological working memory, which is seen as a critical component in the learning of new words. However, no detailed specification of the link between phonological working memory and long-term memory…

Recent brain mapping studies have provided new insights into the cortical systems that mediate human speech perception. Electrocortical stimulation mapping (ESM) is a brain mapping method that is used clinically to localize cortical functions in neurosurgical patients. Recent ESM studies have yielded new insights into the cortical systems that…

The relation between intelligence and speed of auditory discrimination was investigated during an auditory oddball task with backward masking. In target discrimination conditions that varied in the interval between the target and the masking stimuli and in the tonal frequency of the target and masking stimuli, higher ability participants (HA)…

It was hypothesized that stuttering may be related to impaired sensory gating, leading to overflow of superfluous disturbing auditory feedback and breakdown of the speech sequence. This hypothesis was tested using the "acoustic startle prepulse inhibition" (PPI) paradigm. A group of 22 adults with developmental stuttering were compared…

Previous studies have shown that adults respond faster and more reliably to bimodal compared to unimodal localization cues. The current study investigated for the first time the development of audiovisual (A-V) integration in spatial localization behavior in infants between 1 and 10 months of age. We observed infants' head and eye movements in…

This paper presents three studies which examine the susceptibility of sentence comprehension to intrusion by extra-sentential probe words in two on-line dual-task techniques commonly used to study sentence processing: the cross-modal lexical priming paradigm and the unimodal all-visual lexical priming paradigm. It provides both a general review…