This study examined effects of talker variability and lexical difficulty on spoken-word recognition among native and non-native listeners with either normal or impaired hearing. Non-native listeners required greater intensity for equal intelligibility than native listeners. Significant effects of talker variability and lexical difficulty were…

Investigates the evaluation abilities of university music majors, as compared to expert voice teachers, in the evaluation of solo vocal performance. Concludes that the experts attained higher scores on the three measures of evaluation ability because of their previous evaluation experience and acquired critical listening skills. (CMK)

Compares patterns of rubato usage in four performances of an excerpt from the Mozart Concerto Number 2 in Eb Major for Horn and Orchestra with assessments of musicianship. Indicates that: (1) rhythm is an important aspect of musicianship; and (2) the largest positive assessment change occurred simultaneously with the use of rubato. (CMK)

Discusses factors that influence learners' listening comprehension in relation to a group of Chinese English-as-Second-Language learners in Singapore. Reports on how one type of knowledge, within a broader framework of metacognitive knowledge, affects listening comprehension in learners of different ability levels. (Author/VWL)

Investigates the effect of bilingualism (Greek/Australian English) on speakers' ability to perceive unfamiliar speech contrasts (in this case Thai) and whether speakers' speech productions bear any relationship to their speech perception. Results suggest that bilinguals who exaggerate the voicing differences between sounds when speaking, best…

Explores the influence of tempo on musical preference for students in grades 2-6, focusing on the effects of various styles using a MIDI keyboard. Explains that the students listened to 10 musical selections identifying their preferences and perceptions of tempo. Reveals that the preferred styles were Hip-Hop, Heavy Rock Shuffle, Samba, and Funk2.…

This study examined the influence of stimulus context and audibility on sentence recognition in 60 normal-hearing children, 24 hearing-impaired children, and 20 normal-hearing adults. For both semantically correct and semantically anomalous sentences, there was a systematic age-related shift in the performance-intensity functions. Data from the…

Background: Receptive language impairments in school-age children have a poor prognosis, yet there is a dearth of research on effective interventions. Aims: Children's responses to a computerized grammatical training program were evaluated to consider whether repeated responding to spoken sentences with variable semantic content and the same…

Researchers used alternating treatment designs to investigate the effects of listening-while-reading (LWR) and listening interventions on comprehension levels and rates in four middle school students with emotional disorders. During LWR, students were instructed to read passages silently along with experimenters. During the listening condition, we…

Because students with visual impairments need auditory materials in order to access information, listening comprehension skills are important to their academic success. The present study investigated the effectiveness of summarization-based cumulative retelling strategy on the listening comprehension of four visually impaired college students. An…

Children typically learn in classroom environments that have background noise and reverberation that interfere with accurate speech perception. Amplification technology can enhance the speech perception of students who are hard of hearing. Purpose: This study used a single-subject alternating treatments design to compare the speech recognition…

Purpose: This investigation examined the comprehension of third person singular /s/ in 30 African American English (AAE)-speaking children as a subject-number agreement marker on a comprehension task. Method: A comprehension task was presented to 30 typically developing AAE-speaking children between the ages of 4 and 6. The children were randomly…

Deficits in temporal resolution and/or the precedence effect may underlie part of the speech understanding difficulties experienced by older listeners in degraded acoustic environments. In a previous investigation, R. Roberts and J. Lister (2004) identified a positive correlation between measures of temporal resolution and the precedence effect,…

The authors used 2 "visual-world" eye-tracking experiments to examine lexical access using Dutch constructions in which the verb did or did not place semantic constraints on its subsequent subject noun phrase. In Experiment 1, fixations to the picture of a cohort competitor (overlapping with the onset of the referent's name, the subject) did not…

This article introduces the reader to two online sources of materials for working on improving listening and reading skills. The materials are intended for learners already at Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) Level 3 (Superior) proficiency in Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Korean, Russian, and Spanish, who desire to reach Level 4 (Distinguished, or…