Effects on the event-related potential (ERP) waveform of differences in stimuli (task difficulty) and threshold were studied with 35 undergraduates performing a visual inspection time task and 30 performing a pitch discrimination task. In both tasks, ERP differences related to threshold were temporally localized differences in waveform shape. (SLD)

Used a semantic and morpho-syntactic priming paradigm to examine at which processing stage the advantage of blind adults may arise. Concludes that the faster speech comprehension skills of blind adults may originate from a more efficient perceptual analysis rather than from a more extended use of semantic or morpho-syntactic context information.…

Forty second-graders, 20 good and 20 poor readers, completed a /ba/-/da/ temporal order judgment (TOJ) task. The groups did not differ in TOJ when /ba/ and /da/ were paired with more easily discriminated syllables. Poor readers' difficulties with /ba/-/da/ reflected perceptual confusion between phonetically similar syllables rather than difficulty…

Investigated the relationship between auditory temporal processing of nonspeech sounds and phonological awareness ability in 8- to 12-year-olds with a reading disability, placed in groups based on performance on Tallal's tone-order judgment task. Found that a tone-order deficit did not relate to performance on order processing of speech sounds, to…

Tasks assessing perception of auditory temporal and nontemporal cues were administered to children with reading disorders (RD) with or without attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or with ADHD alone. The presence of RD was associated only with a deficit in detection of a tone onset time synchrony. The presence of ADHD was associated with a…

This study compared the speech-in-noise perception abilities of children with (n=63) and without (n=36) learning disabilities (LD) when either speaking style (conversational vs. clear) or signal-to-noise ratio was varied. Children with LD had poorer overall sentence-in-noise perception. The clear speech condition was sufficient to improve some LD…

Findings from a study in which twins were given tests of onward repetition and auditory processing are discussed. Children with specific language impairments were impaired on both measures, but deficits had different origins. Auditory processing problems showed no evidence of genetic influence, whereas the nonword repetition deficit was highly…

Eighteen adult listeners assessed whether stuttering samples were authentic or simulated. Results support the concepts that the production of stuttered and nonstuttered speech disruptions are experienced as being qualitatively different; only stutterers can validly recognize the difference, and only when it occurs; stuttering is a…

Psychometric functions (PFD) for the detection of pure tones were obtained from 10 adolescent and young adult listeners with normal hearing and 10 adult listeners with sensorineural impairments of presumed cochlear origin. The slopes of the PFDs were abnormally steep in some of the hearing-impaired listeners but were statistically significant only…

An intermodal preference task, which presents 2 events side-by-side with a single sound track appropriate to 1 event, and measures subjects' visual preferences, was presented to 23 children with autism. Subjects showed the intermodal matching effect demonstrated with normal infants and young children; subjects did not demonstrate primary…

A study measuring average evoked potentials in 21 college students finds that intelligence test scores correlate significantly with the difference between string length in attended and nonattended conditions, a finding that suggests that previous inconsistencies in reporting string length-intelligence correlations may have resulted from confound…

Eighty normally hearing children (ages 4 to 8) judged the clarity of sentences that were systematically bandpass-filtered to increase intelligibility. Study of 10 subjects at each age found that children 5 years or older were able to make reliable clarity judgements using paired comparisons or category rating; however, the method of paired…

Results from 3 experiments in auditory word recognition involving a total of 266 undergraduates supported interactive models of lexical processing, but required additional sublexical processes. The hypothesized sublexical mechanism is fast acting and frequency sensitive and produces top-down effects, but its operation has not yet been fully…

Long-term effects on auditory electrophysiology from early fluctuating hearing loss were studied in 27 children, aged 5 to 7 years, who had been evaluated originally in infancy. Findings suggested that early fluctuating hearing loss disrupts later auditory brain stem electrophysiology. (Author/DB)

The observed listening performances of 64 children (ages 7-11) with central auditory processing (CAP) disorders were evaluated. Data indicated wide variations in listening performance depending upon the listening conditions and listening functions being rated. Findings suggested that these children had difficulties in both stressful and ideal…