Perez-Gonzalez, Herszlikowicz, and Williams (2008) demonstrated the emergence of novel intraverbal responses following the training of several intraverbals. The present study replicated and extended that study by separating two training conditions that were combined in the previous study. Nine typically developing children ages 6-7 years were…

Immediate serial recall is seriously disrupted by to-be-ignored sound. According to the embedded-processes model, auditory distractors elicit attentional orienting that draws processing resources away from the recall task. The model predicts that interference should be attenuated after repeated exposure to the auditory distractors. Previous…

In two experiments we investigated the relationship between the working memory skills of sign language interpreters and the quality of their interpretations. In Experiment 1, we found that scores on 3-back tasks with signs and words were not related to the quality of interpreted narratives. In Experiment 2, we found that memory span scores for…

This fMRI study was conducted to investigate whether language semantics is processed even when attention is not explicitly directed to word meanings. In the "unattended" condition, the subjects performed a visual detection task while hearing semantically related and unrelated word pairs. In the "phoneme" condition, the subjects made phoneme…

The aim of this study was to investigate individual differences in the influence of lexical association on word recognition during auditory sentence processing. Lexical associations among individual words (e.g. salt and pepper) represent one type of semantic information that is available during the processing of words in context. We predicted that…

Infants' abilities to discriminate native and non-native phonemes have been extensively investigated in monolingual learners, demonstrating a transition from language-general to language-specific sensitivities over the first year after birth. However, these studies have mostly been limited to the study of vowels and consonants in monolingual…

The relation between mental ability and the ability to detect violations of an abstract, third-order conjunction rule was examined using event-related potential measures, specifically mismatch negativity (MMN). The primary objective was to determine whether the extraction of invariant relations based on abstract conjunctions between two…

This study was a systematic replication and extension of Fisher, Kodak, and Moore (2007), in which a picture prompt embedded into a least-to-most prompting sequence facilitated acquisition of auditory-visual conditional discriminations. Participants were 4 children who had been diagnosed with autism; 2 had limited prior receptive skills, and 2 had…

Three experiments studied auditory streaming using sequences of alternating "ABA" triplets, where "A" and "B" were 50-ms tones differing in frequency by [delta]f semitones and separated by 75-ms gaps. Experiment 1 showed that detection of a short increase in the gap between a B tone and the preceding A tone, imposed on one ABA triplet, was better…

Combining information from the visual and auditory senses can greatly enhance intelligibility of natural speech. Integration of audiovisual speech signals is robust even when temporal offsets are present between the component signals. In the present study, we characterized the temporal integration window for speech and nonspeech stimuli with…

Listeners had to compare, with respect to pitch (frequency), a pure tone (T) to a combination of pure tones presented subsequently (C). The elements of C were either synchronous, and therefore difficult to hear out individually, or asynchronous and therefore easier to hear out individually. In the "present/absent" condition, listeners had to judge…

While many constraints on learning must be relatively experience-independent, past experience provides a rich source of guidance for subsequent learning. Discovering structure in some domain can inform a learner's future hypotheses about that domain. If a general property accounts for particular sub-patterns, a rational learner should not…

Across languages, children with developmental dyslexia have a specific difficulty with the neural representation of the sound structure (phonological structure) of speech. One likely cause of their difficulties with phonology is a perceptual difficulty in auditory temporal processing (Tallal, 1980). Tallal (1980) proposed that basic auditory…

Effects of sex and handedness on the production of spontaneous and click-evoked otoacoustic emissions (OAEs) were explored in a non-hearing impaired population (ages 17-25 years). A sex difference in OAEs, either produced spontaneously (spontaneous OAEs or SOAEs) or in response to auditory stimuli (click-evoked OAEs or CEOAEs) has been reported in…

The iambic-trochaic law has been proposed to account for the grouping of auditory stimuli: Sequences of sounds that differ only in duration are grouped as iambs (i.e., the most prominent element marks the end of a sequence of sounds), and sequences that differ only in pitch or intensity are grouped as trochees (i.e., the most prominent element…