Reports results of the administration of a battery of tests of oral language skills to blind braille readers (N=15). Three skills were tested: phoneme deletion, sentence completion, and morphological analysis. Participants were congenitally blind high school students. Subjects differed from sighted readers only in the ability to perform…

Discusses the field of television aesthetics and its contribution to education. Highlights include visual and auditory perception; cognition; composition of television images; and criteria for the analysis and evaluation of educational or instructional television programs, including content, medium, impact on the audience, perceptual factors,…

Ten children, adolescents, and prelinguistically deafened adults implanted with cochlear implants exhibited substantial postoperative benefits in open-set speech perception, with some improvement in closed-set speech recognition. Results are discussed with reference to such variables as age at onset of loss, duration of profound loss, age at…

This study, involving 24 young and elderly normal-hearing adults, addressed the effects of aging on auditory serial-recall performance for natural and synthetic words. Serial recall of monosyllabic words was not affected by age per se or by rate of presentation, but word difficulty affected recall for both groups. (Author/JDD)

Explains how the ear and the brain work together to make music listening possible. Argues good hearing does not ensure skilled listening, stressing that listening is a mental process. Examines the aural process and properties of sound, and describes listening behaviors within the basic levels of auditory processing. Provides a guide for teaching…

A study compared continuous discourse tracking rates in eight children (ages 8-14) with hearing impairments and eight typical children using three competing noise conditions: classroom noise, videotaped classroom activity, and combined noise and visual activity. Statistical analyses showed no significant differences among tracking rates due to the…

A study used impulse response measures and observations in 10 Florida classrooms to develop 10 recommendations for improving the acoustical environment in schools. Recommendations include improving air-conditioning systems, limiting room volume, providing sound-absorbing surfaces, using carpeting, reducing distance between teachers and students,…

Reports on the perceptual discrimination of segmental and suprasegmental phones by Japanese learners of English. Results reveal that early learners showed better discrimination performance than normal learners and confirmed the usefulness of learning English at an early age. (16 references) (Author/CK)

We report four experiments designed to determine whether visual information affects judgments of acoustically-specified nonspeech events as well as speech events (the "McGurk effect"). Previous findings have shown only weak McGurk effects for nonspeech stimuli, whereas strong effects are found for consonants. We used click sounds that…

Purpose: To examine the perception of synthetic speech by individuals with severe intellectual disabilities using a closed-response format task. Method: Participants were 14 individuals with severe intellectual disabilities and a group of 14 typical individuals. A between-groups design was used to compare the performance of the 2 groups on word…

This study investigated the utility of central auditory processing disorder (CAPD) assessments in 70 children being evaluated for learning and attention problems, by assessing their relationship to auditory-based neuropsychological tests with varying degrees of attentional, linguistic, and cognitive complexity. Students were given several tests to…

This study investigated associations between infants' prelinguistic communicative behaviors at 9 months and their communication and language performance at 12 and 18 months. The inclusion of both hearing (N=19) and deaf (N=16) infants in the study allowed identification of effects related to the receptive communication modality (vision versus…

Television has the ability to present information in two sensory channels simultaneously. Well-constructed dual-channel messages have great power to facilitate remembering and understanding, but poorly constructed ones have the power to confuse. Researchers' descriptions of audio/video combinations were compared with those of audience members and…

This paper describes a project for improving the reading and decoding skills of 23 high school students with reading learning disabilities. The targeted population consisted of high school students in a suburban community in the Midwest. The project used Auditory Discrimination in Depth, which is a multisensory program that develops…

In the past 25 years, there has been an explosion in research on the development of perception. The research has produced discoveries at multiple levels: ecological analyses, models of representation and process, and improved understanding of biological mechanisms. This book provides a comprehensive treatment of infant perception, bringing…