Sequences of notes contain several different types of pitch cues, including both absolute and relative pitch information. What factors determine which of these cues are used when learning about tone sequences? Previous research suggests that infants tend to preferentially process absolute pitch patterns in continuous tone sequences, while other…

Reviews of the dyslexia literature often seem to suggest that children with dyslexia perform at a lower level on almost any task. Richards et al. (Dyslexia 2002; 8: 1-8) note the importance of being able to demonstrate dissociations between tasks. However, increasingly elegant experiments, in which dissociations are found, almost inevitably find…

This study demonstrates that listeners use lexical knowledge in perceptual learning of speech sounds. Dutch listeners first made lexical decisions on Dutch words and nonwords. The final fricative of 20 critical words had been replaced by an ambiguous sound, between [f] and [s]. One group of listeners heard ambiguous [f]-final words (e.g.,…

Five experiments investigated the recognition of proper names and common nouns using the lexical decision paradigm. In Experiments 1-3 the case of the initial letter of written stimuli was systematically varied. An advantage was consistently found for proper names written with the first letter in capital. Crucially, response times to proper names…

A Cantonese syllable-spotting experiment was conducted to examine whether the Possible-Word Constraint (PWC), proposed by Norris, McQueen, Cutler, and Butterfield (1997), can apply in Cantonese speech segmentation. In the experiment, listeners were asked to spot out the target Cantonese syllable from a series of nonsense sound strings. Results…

The ability to discriminate the spectral shapes of complex sounds is critical to accurate speech perception. Part of the difficulty experienced by listeners with hearing loss in understanding speech sounds in noise may be related to a smearing of the internal representation of the spectral peaks and valleys because of the loss of sensitivity and…

Reynolds and Nicolson ("Dyslexia," 2007; 13: 78-96) claim to show that the "dyslexia dyspraxia attention-deficit treatment" (DDAT) benefits children with reading difficulties. However, Rack, Snowling, Hulme, and Gibbs ("Dyslexia," 2007; 13: 97-104) argue that because this study did not include an untrained control group then "all that needs to be…

Recent brain mapping studies have provided new insights into the cortical systems that mediate human speech perception. Electrocortical stimulation mapping (ESM) is a brain mapping method that is used clinically to localize cortical functions in neurosurgical patients. Recent ESM studies have yielded new insights into the cortical systems that…

One of the major challenges facing South African higher education institutions is to deal with the learning preferences and styles of an increasing diverse student population. Although much research has been conducted on the identification of learning styles theories for classroom application, little attention has been devoted to the investigation…

Two experiments investigated sensory/motor-based functional knowledge of man-made objects: manipulation features associated with the actual usage of objects. In Experiment 1, a series of prime-target pairs was presented auditorily, and participants were asked to make a lexical decision on the target word. Participants made a significantly faster…

The study examined whether people can extract speech related information from the talker's upper face that was presented using either normally textured videos (Experiments 1 and 3) or videos showing only the outlined of the head (Experiments 2 and 4). Experiments 1 and 2 used within- and cross-modal matching tasks. In the within-modal task,…

Many models of spoken word recognition posit the existence of lexical and sublexical representations, with excitatory and inhibitory mechanisms used to affect the activation levels of such representations. Bottom-up evidence provides excitatory input, and inhibition from phonetically similar representations leads to lexical competition. In such a…

This study compared monosyllabic word recognition in quiet, noise, and noise with reverberation for 15 monolingual American English speakers and 12 Spanish-English bilinguals who had learned English prior to 6 years of age and spoke English without a noticeable foreign accent. Significantly poorer word recognition scores were obtained for the…

The present study investigated perceptual characteristics of speech in persons with stuttering before and after speech therapy. Five adult stutterers served as subjects. All the stutterers underwent prolongation therapy. Percentage of dysfluency, rate of reading, and type of dysfluencies were calculated in reading and spontaneous speech, before…

This study investigated acoustic-phonetics of coronal stop production by adult simultaneous bilingual and monolingual speakers of Canadian English (CE) and Canadian French (CF). Differences in the phonetics of CF and CE include voicing and place of articulation distinctions. CE has a two-way voicing distinction (in syllable initial position)…