Verbal and musical stimuli were presented to infants in a study of the relations of evoked potential left-right amplitude asymmetries to gender and hand preference. There was a relation between asymmetry and hand preference, and for girls, between asymmetry and stimulus condition. Results suggest a gender difference in cerebral hemisphere…

Reviews the literature on the use of music therapy with visually impaired and socially isolated children. Describes ways that music therapy can help the child explore his environment, modify blindisms (stereotypic, autistic-like behaviors), and encourage social awareness and interaction with other children. (DB)

A study found no differences in the effectiveness of single- and multiple-work auditory prompts in teaching five adolescents with moderate mental retardation to transition through a chain of vocational tasks into work settings. Self-operated auditory prompts were effective for teaching workers to manage their own task change behavior. (Author/CR)

Forty-five children and adolescents had skin conductance recorded during a presentation of tones and a reaction time test and were assessed for extraversion. Found that extraversion was negatively correlated with skin conductance response magnitudes to all stimuli--somewhat more strongly for reaction-time stimuli--and with reaction time. (HTH)

Explores the hypothesis that children identified as having phonological processing problems may have difficulty processing a different accent. Children with speech difficulties were compared with matched controls on four measures of auditory processing. Children were presented with stimuli in their own accent and in an unfamiliar accent…

Children who have status epilepticus have continuous or rapidly repeating seizures that may be life-threatening and may cause life-long changes in brain and behavior. The extent to which status epilepticus causes deficits in auditory discrimination is unknown. A naturalistic auditory location discrimination method was used to evaluate this…

Two priming experiments demonstrated exogenous attentional persistence to the fundamental auditory dimensions of frequency (Experiment 1) and time (Experiment 2). In a divided-attention task, participants responded to an independent dimension, the identification of three-tone sequence patterns, for both prime and probe stimuli. The stimuli were…

Young children often have a preference for auditory input, with auditory input often overshadowing visual input. The current research investigated the developmental trajectory and factors underlying these effects with 137 infants, 132 four-year-olds, and 89 adults. Auditory preference reverses with age: Infants demonstrated an auditory preference,…

The article discusses music learning through aural, visual and kinesthetic strategies. Most general music teachers are aware of the contributions made to the profession by proponents of the Dalcroze, Kodaly, and Orff approaches to music instruction. It was claimed that students used one of the said strategies as their most efficient way to process…

The purpose of this investigation was to document performance of participants wearing a cochlear implant and hearing aid in opposite ears on speech-perception and localization tests. Twelve individuals who wore a cochlear implant and a hearing aid on contralateral ears were tested on their abilities to understand words in quiet and sentences in…

This study investigated the possibility that the amount of content children include in their stories is affected by how stories are presented. Simple stories were presented to kindergarten and Grade 2 children in 3 conditions: orally (oral only), pictorially (pictures only), and combined oral and pictures. The kindergarteners recalled more content…

Episodic memory (EM) deficits are the hall-mark of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Story-retelling tasks are particularly sensitive to EM impairments and require participants to recall a short story immediately and after a delay. The purpose of this study was to determine whether presentation modality influences story recall in AD participants. Thirty…

The effects of different types and amounts of environmental stimuli (visual and auditory) on microswitch use and behavioral states of three individuals with profound multiple impairments were examined. The individual's switch use and behavioral states were measured under three setting conditions: natural stimuli (typical visual and auditory…

Until recently most models of word recognition have assumed that semantic effects come into play only after the identification of the word in question. What little evidence exists for early semantic effects in word recognition has relied primarily on priming manipulations using the lexical decision task, and has used visual stimulus presentation.…

The basolateral amygdala's involvement in fear acquisition and expression to visual and auditory stimuli is well known. The involvement of the basolateral and other amygdala areas in fear acquisition and expression to stimuli of other modalities is less certain. We evaluated the contribution of the basolateral and medial amygdala to olfactory and…