Concludes that there is a relationship between auditory closure and reading and that the relationship is educationally significant. (FL)

Considers silence and the dimensions of sound. (Editor/RK)

A series of experiments indicated that by 1 year of age, infants' perceptual categories correspond to linguistically significant categories. Developmental change between 6 and 12 months shows that perceptual abilities of the 1-year-old are not arbitrary, do not reflect all the discriminatory capabilities of the infant, and are similar to phonemic…

Examined rate-based intersensory matching in infants by habituating them to concordant or discordant auditory-visual stimuli. Found a preference for the visual stimulus that moved at a novel velocity, indicating that the temporal attributes of the visual component dominated responsiveness. Found only limited evidence of intersensory matching. (WP)

College students listened to recordings of infant cries that varied in the duration of crying sounds and of pauses between crying sounds. Results indicated that the shorter the duration of the pause the more informative, arousing, and aversive was the cry in the judgment of the students. (BC)

Infants (n=34) were tested on a speech-sound discrimination-in-noise task using the visual reinforcement of infant speech discrimination procedure. An adult control group was also tested. The infant-adult difference in discrimination threshold in noise was 6.9 dB. Advantages of this adaptive threshold procedure and possible applications are noted.…

Used a modified visual-fixation-based auditory-preference procedure to test preferences for infant-directed singing versus adult-directed singing in 15 two-day-old hearing infants of deaf parents. Subjects heard a Japanese and an English play song. Found that infants prefer infant-directed singing over adult-directed singing and that the…

Presents a four-part theoretical treatment of the planning of speech movements that favors models in which the only invariant targets are regions in auditory perceptual space over models that posit invariant construction targets. Computer simulations illustrate the models. (SLD)

This paper describes a new "class" of auditory tests designed to evaluated the ability of young children to detect commonly encountered sounds; localize sound sources; and understand speech in noise. The tests appear to be sensitive to the effects of auditory pathology and to the normal development of auditory processing skills. (DB)

Ten children (ages 12-16) with specific language impairments (SLI) and controls matched for chronological or language age were tested with measures of complex sound localization involving the precedence effect phenomenon. SLI children exhibited tracking skills similar to language-age matched controls, indicating impairment in their ability to use…

Tested 67 undergraduates on a new auditory inspection time task based on the ability to locate the left or right position of a stereophonic source and on a version of Raven's Progressive Matrices (Page and Crawford, unpublished). The new task appears to be accessible to a wider range of subjects than successive frequency discrimination tasks. (SLD)

Open-set word and sentence speech-perception test scores are commonly used as a measure of hearing abilities in children and adults using cochlear implants and/or hearing aids. These tests ore usually presented auditorily with a verbal response. In the case of children, scores are typically lower and more variable than for adults with hearing…

The difficulty that older listeners experience understanding conversational speech may be related to their limited ability to use information present in the silent intervals (i.e., temporal gaps) between dynamic speech sounds. When temporal gaps are present between nonspeech stimuli that are spectrally invariant (e.g., noise bands or sinusoids),…

To determine the effect of asymmetrical signal degradation on binaural speech recognition, 28 children and 14 adults were administered a sentence recognition task amidst multitalker babble. There were 3 listening conditions: (a) monaural, with mild degradation in 1 ear; (b) binaural, with mild degradation in both ears (symmetric degradation); and…

Often, the sound arriving at the ears is a mixture from many different sources, but only 1 is of interest. To assist with selection, the auditory system structures the incoming input into streams, each of which ideally corresponds to a single source. Some authors have argued that this process of streaming is automatic and invariant, but recent…