Investigates causes of high and low reading achievement among elementary students using a causal model. Finds support for the model. Notes an implication of the model is that teaching and learning relevant to improving listening comprehension and word identification proximally affect verbal knowledge and pronunciation knowledge, and distally…

This study examined infants' abilities to separate speech from different talkers and to recognize a familiar word (the infant's own name) in the context of noise. In 4 experiments, infants heard repetitions of either their names or unfamiliar names in the presence of background babble. Five-month-old infants listened longer to their names when the…

This study focused on listeners' (N = 66 undergraduate and graduate music education majors) ability to identify nuances of musical expression using figurative language and specific music terminology. Data reviewed for accuracy in classifying general expressive categories showed that listeners were successful at identifying broad intended realms of…

The diagnosis of autism, although a source of discussion and occasional controversy, has consistently included poor communication as an essential component. Both the text revision of the fourth edition of the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" (American Psychiatric Association, 2000) and the 10th edition of the "International…

"The Mozart effect" originally referred to the phenomenon of a brief enhancement of spatial-temporal abilities in college students after listening to a Mozart piano sonata (K. 448). Over time, this term was conflated with an independent series of studies on the effects of music instruction. This occurrence has caused confusion that has been…

The Conflict Resolution Model was formulated by a group of Australian psychologists who set about integrating the literature on achieving mutually beneficial outcomes in a conflict situation in order to create a best-practice prescriptive process for conflict resolution. A number of experimental studies conducted at the University of Tasmania with…

Numerous studies related to listening comprehension strategies have been published in the past two decades. The present study seeks to build upon two previous reviews of listening comprehension strategies research. Of particular interest in this review are studies dealing with the types of cues used by listeners, the sequence of listening,…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to evaluate adaptation to the electropalatograph (EPG) from the perspective of consonant acoustics, listener perceptions, and speaker ratings. Method: Seven adults with typical speech wore an EPG and pseudo-EPG palate over 2 days and produced syllables, read a passage, counted, and rated their adaptation to…

Two striking contrasts currently exist in the sentence processing literature. First, whereas adult readers rely heavily on lexical information in the generation of syntactic alternatives, adult listeners in world-situated eye-gaze studies appear to allow referential evidence to override strong countervailing lexical biases (Tanenhaus,…

Fourteen native speakers of German heard normal sentences, sentences which were either lacking dynamic pitch variation (flattened speech), or comprised of intonation contour exclusively (degraded speech). Participants were to listen carefully to the sentences and to perform a rehearsal task. Passive listening to flattened speech compared to normal…

Tracheoesophageal (TE) speakers often have difficulty producing the voiced-voiceless distinction. Phonation offset (POff) as a TE speaker transitions from a vowel to a stop consonant may be altered, possibly contributing to listener misperceptions. The purposes of this study were to: (1) compare the duration of POff in TE versus laryngeal…

We report preliminary behaviour genetic analyses of reading and listening comprehension from The Colorado Learning Disabilities Research Center. Although the twin sample with these new measures is still of limited size, we find substantial, and significant, genetic influences on individual differences in both reading and listening comprehension.…

This paper reports on an experiential project that involved a group of children aged four to five years and their teachers in an investigation of sounds in their local environment. It describes the key elements of an eight-week teaching and learning program that encouraged children to experience and re-experience their surrounding sound…

Stetson (1951) noted that repeating singleton coda consonants at fast speech rates makes them be perceived as onset consonants affiliated with a following vowel. The current study documents the perception of rate-induced resyllabification, as well as what temporal properties give rise to the perception of syllable affiliation. Stimuli were…

There are reasons to believe that infant-directed (ID) speech may make language acquisition easier for infants. However, the effects of ID speech on infants' learning remain poorly understood. The experiments reported here assess whether ID speech facilitates word segmentation from fluent speech. One group of infants heard a set of nonsense…