Reviews phoneme monitoring studies from 1969 to 1996 and groups them in terms of issues addressed with the task, including the contribution of the lexicon to speech perception, processing complexity, attention, contribution of prosodic information, and the basic unit of speech perception. Identifies and highlights task demands and artifactual…

Argues for the importance of phonological form in the second language (L2) classroom, proposing that a thorough grounding in L2 phonological patterns is essential for language learners. Suggests the importance of phonological information for the auditory detection of morphological form in French. (Author/VWL)

Presents a follow-up of a study of the perceptual acquisition of Thai laryngeal contrasts by native speakers of English, which found that subjects performed better on contrasts in voice than aspiration. This study further investigated possible task effects by examining the discrimination and categorization of the same stimuli in various…

Sixteen children with moderate to profound sensorineural hearing loss were trained on the production and auditory perception of sibilants over two 2-week periods. Perception performance improved significantly during training periods with a small amount of carryover to non-training contrast periods. Improvements in production performance occurred…

This article discusses combining two effective instructional methods (Classwide Peer Tutoring and a spelling strategy) to help students acquire and maintain spelling competence inside and outside of the classroom. The spelling strategy, SPELLER, is a seven-step strategy that uses visual imagery, systematic testing, and auditory reinforcement.…

A non-verbal 12-year-old boy with low functioning autism was tested on an auditory word-to-picture selection task. Picture foils were chosen to have visual features, semantic features, both, or neither in common with the correct answer. Errors were made more often to semantically than to visually related items. (Contains references.) (Author/CR)

A perceptual fading technique was used to teach unilingual adult Canadian francophones to identify the voiceless and voiced linguadental fricatives of English. After just 90 minutes of training, subjects were better able to identify both the training stimuli and an untrained set of natural consonant-vowel exemplars produced by 4 different…

The study examined the developmental lag hypothesis for learning disabilities by evaluating dichotic listening ability using both free recall and directed attention conditions in 24 learning disabled (LD) adults. Findings indicated LD adults showed similar deficits in lateralized selective auditory linguistic processing as children with LD. (DB)

This study examined phonological processing in 30 less-skilled third-grade readers, 30 younger children at the same reading level, and 30 more-skilled age mates. The less-skilled readers had significantly lower accuracy scores than both age mates and younger normal readers on word span, word-pair repetition, tongue twister, and, especially,…

Three studies investigated infants' and young children's perception of the unity of musical events. Results indicated that properties specific to musical instrument families are relevant for young children's perception of musical events. Specific experience with a variety of instruments is evidently not necessary for detecting correspondences of…

The possibility that perceptual predispositions may assist young language learners in the initial identification of words in speech was investigated in a corpus of early words. Results suggest that syllables that are stressed or final in adult speech are particularly salient to young children and likely to be extracted and included in first…

In this study, phonological similarity neighborhood sizes were calculated for expressive lexicon derived from 2 vocabulary lists representative of children aged 1;3 to 3;0. Over 80% of the words in these early lexicons had at least one phonological neighbor; nearly 20% had six or more phonological neighbors. (Contains 29 references.)

This study compared 20 children (ages 8-14) with either autism or receptive developmental language disorder (RDLD) to 10 controls in their ability to detect frequent and infrequent randomly presented auditory stimuli. Only the children with autism demonstrated an abnormally small amplitude of the P3b, a component of the event-related brain…

This study evaluated the peripheral and central auditory functioning (and thus the potential to perceive obstacles through reflected sound) of eight totally blind persons and eight sighted persons. The blind subjects were able to process auditory information faster than the control group. (Author/DB)

Infants who were in darkness were presented with objects that made sounds. Objects were within reach and out of reach. Infants reached into the target area more often when the object was in reach than when the object was beyond reach. Infants reached correctly in the dark for objects placed off midline. (BC)