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…

Two experiments investigated sensory/motor-based functional knowledge of man-made objects: manipulation features associated with the actual usage of objects. In Experiment 1, a series of prime-target pairs was presented auditorily, and participants were asked to make a lexical decision on the target word. Participants made a significantly faster…

This article presents a longitudinal study of the early literacy development of 47 children with speech difficulties from ages 4 to 7 years. Of these children, 19 with specific speech difficulties were compared with 19 children with speech and language difficulties and 19 normally developing controls. The risk of literacy difficulties was greater…

The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of sight-singing instruction using specific pitch skills emphasizing scale degree and harmonic function. Fifteen pitch skills encompassing scalar, cadential, and chordal tasks were included in the study. Over a 12-week period, two randomly assigned groups of novice high school singers…

This study examined the interaction between speech perception and sentential context among 13 poor readers and 49 good readers in grades one to three. Children's performance was examined on tasks assessing expressive and receptive vocabulary, reading skill, phonological awareness, pseudoword repetition, and phoneme identification. Good readers…

The study examined whether people can extract speech related information from the talker's upper face that was presented using either normally textured videos (Experiments 1 and 3) or videos showing only the outlined of the head (Experiments 2 and 4). Experiments 1 and 2 used within- and cross-modal matching tasks. In the within-modal task,…

Many models of spoken word recognition posit the existence of lexical and sublexical representations, with excitatory and inhibitory mechanisms used to affect the activation levels of such representations. Bottom-up evidence provides excitatory input, and inhibition from phonetically similar representations leads to lexical competition. In such a…

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…

Many speakers with repaired cleft palate have reduced intelligibility, but there are limitations with current procedures for assessing intelligibility. The aim of this study was to construct a single-word intelligibility test for speakers with cleft palate. The test used a multiple-choice identification format, and was based on phonetic contrasts…

When participants are presented simultaneously with spoken language and a visual display depicting objects to which that language refers, participants spontaneously fixate the visual referents of the words being heard [Cooper, R. M. (1974). The control of eye fixation by the meaning of spoken language: A new methodology for the real-time…

Variability in talker identity and speaking rate, commonly referred to as indexical variation, has demonstrable effects on the speed and accuracy of spoken word recognition. The present study examines the time course of indexical specificity effects to evaluate the hypothesis that such effects occur relatively late in the perceptual processing of…

This study compared monosyllabic word recognition in quiet, noise, and noise with reverberation for 15 monolingual American English speakers and 12 Spanish-English bilinguals who had learned English prior to 6 years of age and spoke English without a noticeable foreign accent. Significantly poorer word recognition scores were obtained for the…

Background: Williams syndrome (WS), a neurodevelopmental disorder, is characterized by pervasive cognitive deficits alongside a relative sparing of auditory perception and cognition. A frequent characteristic of the phenotype is adverse reactions to, and/or fascination with, certain sounds. Previously published reports indicate that people with WS…

The present study investigated perceptual characteristics of speech in persons with stuttering before and after speech therapy. Five adult stutterers served as subjects. All the stutterers underwent prolongation therapy. Percentage of dysfluency, rate of reading, and type of dysfluencies were calculated in reading and spontaneous speech, before…

Perceptual discrimination between speech sounds belonging to different phoneme categories is better than that between sounds falling within the same category. This property, known as ''categorical perception,'' is weaker in children affected by dyslexia. Categorical perception develops from the predispositions of newborns for discriminating all…