Purpose: K. Nishi and D. Kewley-Port (2007) trained Japanese listeners to perceive 9 American English monophthongs and showed that a protocol using all 9 vowels (fullset) produced better results than the one using only the 3 more difficult vowels (subset). The present study extended the target population to Koreans and examined whether protocols…

Background: Recent reports showed that children born with intrauterine growth restriction (IUGR) are at greater risk of experiencing verbal short-term memory span (STM) deficits that may impede their learning capacities at school. It is still unknown whether these deficits are modality dependent. Methods: This long-term, prospective design study…

The effects of lexical context on phonological processing are pervasive and there have been indications that such effects may be modulated by attention. However, attentional modulation in speech processing is neither well documented nor well understood. Experiment 1 demonstrated attentional modulation of lexical facilitation of speech sound…

This article honours Adele Miccio's life work by reflecting on the utility of phonetic transcription. The first section reviews the literature on cases where children whose speech appears to neutralize a contrast in the adult language are found on closer examination to produce a contrast ("covert contrast"). This study presents evidence…

A longitudinal study reported positive speech and language outcomes for 29 children with hearing loss in an auditory-verbal therapy program (AVT group) (aged 2 to 6 years at start; mean PTA 79.39 dB HL) compared with a matched control group with typical hearing (TH group) at 9, 21, and 38 months after the start of the study. The current study…

Synthetic speech stimuli which varied along a continum defined in terms of the relative onset time of the first formant and which are characteristically associated with the phonemes /do/ and /to/ were presented to two groups of subjects for labelling. The stimuli presented to each group were identical except for a one-step shift on the stimulus…

Speech intelligibility was tested in three classroom type spaces, one of 700 square feet, and two of 200 square feet, using student listeners and recorded test material. One of the latter two classrooms was fully carpeted. The test material used was Modified Rhyme Test (MRT) tapes, presented via tape reproducer and loudspeaker. Also investigated…

An approach to music instruction that stresses hearing and analyzing is discussed. (DB)

Two experiments investigated infants' perception of silence in the speech contrast between the words "slit" and "split." Experiment I was designed to determine whether infants could discriminate a speech contrast cued primarily by silence duration. Experiment II studied whether infants can discriminate brief durations of…

Meta-analysis of findings from 106 studies on the relationship of auditory perceptual skills to reading ability indicated that auditory perception is an important correlate of reading achievement, depending upon the combination of auditory and reading variables considered. (Author)

Infants 7 to 8.5 months of age successfully differentiated 2 spectral structures in the context of variations in fundamental frequency, intensity, and duration. Subjects' performance with nonarbitrary categories could not be attributed to memorization of the familiarized set. (RH)

Examines, with skepticism, the history and development of forensic phonetics in response to the publication of "Forensic Phonetics" by J. Baldwin and P. French (1990). Three issues are specifically explored: (1) whether voices are unique, (2) whether a purely auditory approach is adequate, and (3) whether legally sufficient conclusions…

The current study investigated the influence of the second formant (F2) intensity on vowel labeling along a/u/-/i/continuum. Twenty-two listeners with normal-hearing (NH) sensitivity and 14 listeners with sensorineural hearing impairment (HI) were initially presented 2 stimuli for which the F2 intensity differed by 20 dB. The listeners were asked…