Using dichotic listening methodology, 25 musicians and 25 nonmusicians were compared on four cerebral lateralization tasks: melodies, tonal patterns, rhythm patterns, and verbal stimuli. Musicians demonstrated superior performance on the music tasks. Results are interpreted in terms of superior cognitive strategies of musicians as a function of…

The study examined the relationship between two auditory perceptual skills--sound blending and auditory closure--and reading performance in 76 learning disabled elementary school children. (Author/PHR)

Studies on visual, musical, and speech perception abilities were used to construct auditory ability tests. Correlation and factorial analyses indicated separate capacities for auditory verbal comprehension, auditory immediate memory, temporal tracking, auditory cognition of relationships, discrimination among sound patterns, speech perception…

Experiment I showed that hearing subjects outperformed deaf subjects on a lipreading task, possibly because they could supplement lip-read stimuli with stored auditory information. Experiment II demonstrated that sighted subjects did not use stored visual information to supplement auditory input, for they performed no differently from congenitally…

Indicates that native and nonnative speakers alike can make use of intonation if they explicitly listen for it, although prosodic features are generally ignored when other cues (semantic and pragmatic) are available. (Author/RL)

The relationships of varying degrees of auditory processing impairments to vocational interest and social behavior were examined in 43 adolescents (CA 13-6 to 18-6), including 15 learning disabled students; 14 mildly to severely hearing impaired adolescents; and 14 profoundly hearing impaired adolescents. (Author)

Describes an experiment designed to determine the effect of missing syntactic cues on listeners' comprehension of grammatical sentences heard through noise. Comparison between sentences containing function word deletions and sentences with a more clearly displayed syntactic structure suggests that deletion of minor cues hinders comprehension under…

This study investigates performance differences between reflective and impulsive subjects on a recognition memory task. Results indicate that verbal recognition memory is sensitive to both cognitive style and presentation mode. (JMF)

Assesses the relationship between production deficits and speech perception abilities. A categorical perception paradigm was administered to a group of communication disordered children and to a matched control group. Group results are tentatively interpreted as showing a moderate perceptual deficit in the communication disordered children of this…

A phonetic confusion model and some procedural artifacts were eliminated as sources for individual differences in fusion rate. Results of these two experiments were consistent with the hypothesis that individual differences in fusion rate are due to differences in perceptual dependence on linguistic rules. (Editor/RK)

A multiple regression analysis of sequential effects in magnitude estimation and absolute identification is presented as an alternative to the approach used by Lockhead and his students. The new analysis indicates that sequential effects do not extend over more than one trial. (Editor)

Names of cities were shock associated and then embedded in material presented to the nonattended channel in a dichotic listening and shadowing situation. A test for conditioning followed the dichotic listening task. Comparisons are made with other studies of galvanic skin responses to unattended words. (Editor/RK)

Patients (N=110) at three different clinics were fitted binaurally with linear, in-the-canal hearing aids. In all patient groups, significant improvement in performance was observed for linear amplification and for base increase at low levels (BILL) processing when compared to unaided performance. There were no significant differences in aided…

Discusses two auditory comprehension studies that investigated the role of focus, as conveyed by a pitch accent, in the comprehension of relative clauses preceded by a complex noun phrase. Findings include focus attracts modifiers, and pitch accents for new phrases differ acoustically from pitch accents for contrastive phrases. (46 references)…