The purposes of this study were to examine the utilization of audio modification in vocabulary assessment in school subject areas, specifically in elementary science, and to present a web-based key vocabulary assessment tool for the elementary school level. Audio-recorded readings were used to replace independent student readings as the task…

This work investigates how vowel duration and vowel quality affect degrees of vowel-to-vowel coarticulation. The effects of these two factors on vowel-to-vowel coarticulation have previously received little study. Phonological durational differences due to vowel length distinction were examined in Thai. It was hypothesized that shorter vowel…

The present study reports two experiments in which a total of 20 participants without prior flight experience practiced the final approach phase in a fixed-base simulator. All participants received self-controlled concurrent feedback during 180 practice trials. Experiment 1 shows that participants learn more quickly under variable practice…

Behavioural and electrophysiological studies give differing impressions of when auditory discrimination is mature. Ability to discriminate frequency and speech contrasts reaches adult levels only around 12 years of age, yet an electrophysiological index of auditory discrimination, the mismatch negativity (MMN), is reported to be as large in…

The immediate-early gene early growth response gene-1 (EGR-1, zif-268) has been extensively studied in synaptic plasticity and memory formation in a variety of memory systems. However, a convincing role for EGR-1 in amygdala-dependent memory consolidation processes has yet to emerge. In the present study, we have examined the role of EGR-1 in the…

The fluency and the reliability of speech production suggest a mechanism that links motor commands and sensory feedback. Here, we examined the neural organization supporting such links by using fMRI to identify regions in which activity during speech production is modulated according to whether auditory feedback matches the predicted outcome or…

Models of speech perception are in general agreement with respect to the major cortical regions involved, but lack precision with regard to localization and lateralization of processing units. To refine these models we conducted two Activation Likelihood Estimation (ALE) meta-analyses of the neuroimaging literature on sublexical speech perception.…

Sequence learning is essential in cognition and underpins activities such as language and skill acquisition. One classical demonstration of sequence learning is that of the Hebb repetition effect, whereby serial recall improves over repetitions on a repeated list relative to random lists. When addressing the question of which mechanism underlies…

In the present study 24 university students read four different texts in four conditions: (1) while listening to music they preferred to listen to while studying; (2) while listening to music they did not prefer to listen to while studying; (3) while listening to a recording of noise from a cafe; and finally (4) in silence. After each text they…

Purpose: The authors assessed adult selective auditory attention to determine effects of (a) differences between the vocal/speaking characteristics of different mixed-gender pairs of masking talkers and (b) the rhythmic structure of the language of the competing speech. Method: Reception thresholds for English sentences were measured for 50…

Lindstromberg and Boers (2008a, 2008b) have reported experiments with adult learners of English which revealed a comparative mnemonic advantage afforded by word combinations that display sound patterns such as alliteration ("green grass") and assonance ("home phone"). These findings are relevant for TESOL, given the fact that English phraseology…

Audiovisual speech perception was studied in adults with Asperger syndrome (AS), by utilizing the McGurk effect, in which conflicting visual articulation alters the perception of heard speech. The AS group perceived the audiovisual stimuli differently from age, sex and IQ matched controls. When a voice saying /p/ was presented with a face…

This experiment investigated social referencing as a form of discriminative learning in which maternal facial expressions signaled the consequences of the infant's behavior in an ambiguous context. Eleven 4- and 5-month-old infants and their mothers participated in a discrimination-training procedure using an ABAB design. Different consequences…

Students in the United States demonstrate low proficiency in their math skills. One promising intervention, computer-assisted instruction, may be used for remediation. There is growing support that computer-assisted instruction is effective for increasing addition and multiplication accuracy and fluency, but more research is necessary in order to…

Purpose: This study investigated whether computers are a useful tool in the assessment of people with aphasia (PWA). Computerized and traditionally administered versions of tasks were compared to determine whether (a) the scores were equivalent, (b) the administration was comparable, (c) variables such as age affected performance, and (d) the…