Tested the ability of 3.5-month-old infants to detect audiovisual relations. Results demonstrated infants' visual recovery to changes in temporal synchrony of sight and sound and in composition of objects. Infants did not demonstrate visual recovery to changes in the relationship between pitch and color or shape. (BC)

This study evaluated the ability of 30 normally developing children (ages 6-12) to report the perceived location of a stationary fused auditory image (FAI) or track a "moving" FAI. Although subjects performed at normal adult levels with the stationary sound measure, they exhibited a significant age-related trend with the moving sound…

This study evaluated whether listeners can distinguish human brainstem auditory evoked responses elicited by acoustic clicks from control waveforms obtained with no acoustic stimulus when the waveforms are presented auditorily. Detection performance for stimuli presented visually was slightly, but consistently, superior to that which occurred for…

Otoacoustic emissions and behavioral hearing thresholds were measured in 14 participants before and after exposure to a 10-minute 105-dB SPL, half-octave band of noise centered at 1.414kHz. Results showed that the maximum temporary emissions shifts were half to one octave above the exposed frequency. Other findings are discussed. (Author/CR)

This study employed an audiometric test battery with nine blindfolded undergraduate students to explore success factors in echolocation. Echolocation performance correlated significantly with several specific auditory measures. No relationship was found between high-frequency sensitivity and echolocation performance. (Author/PB)

This study examined identification and discrimination of initial bilabial stop consonants differing in voicing by 10 9-year-old children with a history of severe otitis media with effusion (OME). Long-term effects of OME were found for both identification and discrimination performance. In cases of language impairment with early OME, no additional…

Inexperienced trade apprentices were presented with text in a visual-only manner and in both auditory and visual forms. Results show that the diagram-only presentation was the least intelligible, but after two specifically designed training sessions the advantage of the visual diagram-auditory text method disappeared. In a second study, the…

Comparison of the temporal processing abilities of nine college students with diagnosed reading disorders and nine typical students found students with reading disorders exhibited significantly higher error rates in discriminating duration patterns than normal reading controls. Significant correlations were found between reading ability measures…

The auditory word gating paradigm was used to examine the quality of the underlying phonological representations in dyslexic and average readers. Although dyslexic children showed age-related nonword and rapid naming deficits, they did not differ from the age-matched controls in the amount of acoustic-phonetic input required to identify sets of…

A history of hearing and a review of the physics of sound is followed by an overview of how the ear works. The outer hair cell is the focus of particular attention because of its central role in the conversion of sound energy into neural energy used by the brain. Contains a list of recommended resources. (CR)

The present research examined the quality of the phonological representations of French children with specific language impairment (SLI) and those with normal language development (NLD). Twenty-five children with SLI and 50 children with NLD matched on lexical age level participated in an auditory lexical decision task. The observations gathered…

When presented simultaneously with equally discriminable, but unfamiliar, visual and auditory stimuli, 4-year-olds exhibited auditory dominance, processing only auditory information ( Sloutsky & Napolitano, 2003). The current study examined factors underlying auditory dominance. In 6 experiments, 4-year-olds (N181) were presented with auditory and…

Compression hearing aids have the inherent, and often adjustable, feature of release time from compression. Research to date does not provide a consensus on how to choose or set release time. The current study had 2 purposes: (a) a comprehensive evaluation of the acoustic effects of release time for a single-channel compression system in quiet and…

We investigated how different psychophysical procedures affect frequency discrimination performance in children. Four studies used a design in which listeners heard two tone pairs and had to identify whether the first or second pair contained a higher frequency target tone. Thresholds for 6-and 7-year-olds were higher than those for 8- and…

Phoneme identification with audiovisually discrepant stimuli is influenced by information in the visual signal (the McGurk effect). Additionally, lexical status affects identification of auditorily presented phonemes. The present study tested for lexical influences on the McGurk effect. Participants identified phonemes in audiovisually discrepant…