A study investigated whether two speech measures (peak intraoral air pressure (IOP) and IOP duration) obtained during production of intervocalic stops would be altered by the presence or absence of a cochlear implant in five children (ages 7-10). The auditory condition affected peak IOP more than IOP duration. (Contains references.) (Author/CR)

A study examined whether the benefits of modified speech could be extended to provide intelligibility improvements for eight children (ages 8-14) with severe-to-profound hearing impairments who wear sensory aids and five controls. All varieties of modified speech (envelope-amplified, slowed, and both) yielded either equivalent or poorer…

A study investigated how 19 Finnish adults who were postlingually severely or profoundly hearing impaired would relearn to recognize vowels after receiving multi-channel cochlear implants. Average vowel recognition was 68% 6 months after switch-on, and 80% 24 months after switch-on. Vowels y, e, and o were most difficult. (Contains references.)…

A study investigated how 19 Finnish adults who were postlingually severely or profoundly hearing impaired would relearn to recognize consonants after receiving multi-channel cochlear implants. Two years after the switch-on, the mean recognition for consonants was 71%. Consonants with alveolar, palatal, or velar transitions were better recognized.…

Seventy-three children (ages 4-18) with hearing impairments were administered the Auditory Perception of Alphabet Letters test. Results indicated excellent reliability, and high intercorrelations with both open-set and closed-set auditory tests. The study concludes that spoken names of alphabet letters can be employed as an effective auditory…

The study with 989 learning-disabled students supported the cognitive-based arithmetic problem-solving model of Dinnel et al. under continuous visual stimulus conditions but suggested a more complex neuropsychological underpinning to arithmetic performance in both visual and aural stimulus conditions. (Author/DB)

Schools should probably spend more time developing student awareness of learning styles than pushing teachers into more inservice workshops on adapting curriculum. The Learning Channel Preference Checklist included in this article allows students to assess their own preferred learning style(s) by choosing statements stressing visual, auditory, or…

Adolescents with and without learning disabilities (14, 16, and 18 years old) were tested to determine whether they differed in auditory, visual, and/or multisensory social perception abilities. The adolescents with learning disabilities at all age levels were not as adept at understanding nonverbal social information regardless of whether it was…

The study investigated two neurophysiologic components of event-related brain potential during auditory and visual target detection tasks with 11 non-retarded autistic children, 9 retarded autistic children, and 16 normal subjects, aged 15-19. Results were consistent with the hypothesis that non-retarded autism involves abnormal attentional and…

This holistic approach to speechreading instruction proposes: enhancement of the child's self-motivation, strategy-based instruction, an interactive processing approach that focuses on meaning and psycholinguistic guessing, bisensory instruction, and a hierarchical continuum beginning with easy, successful activities that gradually increase in…

Reviews studies in which perceptual cue trading data have been compared with computational models and examines the perception of contrast between the voiceless fricative "s" and the voiceless affricate "ts." Nine subjects listened to a total of 6 tokens each of 193 stimuli and labeled each stimulus as containing either of the…

A gifted boy with a learning disability recounts the difficulties he had in school, the rejection of his peers, a suicide attempt in high school, and his eventual diagnosis with an auditory processing disorder and unipolar depression. Teachers are urged to notice students with similar problems and provide them with needed help. (DB)

Forty-four university students, of whom 11 had learning disabilities (LD), were tested on tasks requiring multisyllabic pseudoword repetition, oral reading, memory for digits, and vocabulary. In both LD and non-LD groups, significant correlations were found between pseudoword repetition accuracy and reading, suggesting that poor readers also have…

Five studies examined the contributions of syllable-ordering and rhythmic properties of syllable strings to 6- and 9-month-old infants' speech segmentation. Results indicate that the capacity for integrating multiple sources of information in speech perception emerges between 6 and 9 months, in rough synchrony with the emergence of integration in…

Studied the ability of 8- and 11-year olds, and college-age subjects, to allocate attention rapidly. Older subjects were better able to reallocate attention. The developmental change in the reallocation of attention appears to be continuous and quantitative. Improvement is linked to the ability to use active attentional strategies. (Author/GH)