Eleven infants with Down's syndrome and 10 of 11 nonhandicapped infants operated an automatic device which enabled them to choose to listen to nursery rhymes sung or played on musical instruments. Both groups preferred the singing, and the Down's Syndrome infants had much longer response durations for the more complex auditory stimuli. (Author/DB)

Discusses the use of visual/aural stimuli in presenting poetry and literature. A step-by-step script for a slide/tape presentation is included. (HTH)

In four experiments, evidence was found for a complex psychological representation of musical pitch. The perception of music depends not only on psychoacoustic properties of the tones, but also on processes that relate the tones to one another through contact with a well-defined and complex psychological representation of musical pitch. (Author/RD)

Forty preschoolers performed a sentence imitation task under four conditions: immediate or delayed imitation of auditorily presented stimuli or immediate or delayed imitation of auditorily and pictorially presented stimuli. Immediate imitation subjects produced fewer total errors and more verbatim responses than did delay interval subjects.…

Examines listeners' use of acoustic properties in making personal attributions. In three experiments, subjects listened to recordings of male speakers answering two interview questions and rated the speakers on a variety of scales. (CM)

Investigates the phenomenon that subjects speaking under exposure to masking noise demonstrate decreases in oral sensory function and temporal reorganization of the articulatory pattern. The study attempts to measure the effects of this phenomenon under varying durations of exposure to auditory masking. (Author/NCR)

Examines, through two studies, how prosodic information affects syntactic processing in locally ambiguous sentences. The first study dealt with people's judgments of the continuation of locally ambiguous sentence fragments of differing lengths. The second concerned ratings of normality of sentence types with differing contours. (27 references)…

Compared effects of syntactic context and attention on identifying masked spoken words in reading-disabled seventh graders and good readers. Found that, in both groups, syntactic structure of context triggers a process of anticipation for particular syntactic categories based on an assumption that linguistic messages are syntactically coherent;…

Summarizes the use of word-spotting in psycholinguistic research. Notes that listeners hear a list of nonsense words, some of which contain embedded real words, and they detect those embedded words, a task designed to study the segmentation of continuous speech. Describes the task and summarizes its advantages and disadvantages. (12 references)…

Results of a study with 52 dyslexic children and 52 normal readers show that reading acceleration through computer-controlled reading rates improves reading performance in both groups, but auditory masking by playing a song is beneficial only to the dyslexic children. Implications are discussed in terms of phonological processing. (SLD)

A study examined the effects of a CD-ROM audio textbook, alone and combined with a complementary strategy (SLiCK), on the academic performance of 95 students with mild disabilities from 8 self-contained special education classes. Students in groups using the audio text performed significantly higher on content-area assessment than other students.…

Investigated relationship between critical flicker fusion (CFF) thresholds and five personality characteristics (alienation; social nonconformity; discomfort, expression, and defensiveness) under three auditory stimulus conditions (quiet, noise, meaningful verbal stimuli). Results from 60 college students revealed that auditory stimulation and…

Five profoundly mentally retarded adolescents and adults were taught to respond to an auditory-visual complex stimulus. Later, the auditory component alone was presented, and three subjects did not respond. These subjects then received a fading program which successfully established auditory stimulus control with two subjects. (MSE)

Two groups of 10 adult aphasics received auditory-verbal "yes-no" questions, including egocentric, environmental, pictorial, and relationship items, either in a consistent order or random order. Support was found for the existence of a hierarchy of difficulty among the types of questions, but there was no significant difference between…

Studied the organization of arousal and attention processes in 138 neurologically at-risk neonates by examining visual preferences when infants were in 3 arousal conditions that involved light panel stimuli. There were no differences in preferences in the two conditions that caused the most arousal. (LB)