Augments Michael Studdert-Kennedy's state-of-the-art report on speech perception research (EJ 227 656) with comments on categorical perception of speech and nonspeech stimuli, speech perception in context, the role of prosody, and development/impairments of speech perception. Includes a summary of a discussion on speech perception research. (RL)

Seventy-two junior high general music students were taught to identify primary harmonic functions by using either a scalar or root harmonic aural perception technique. Students were then tested with an aural identification battery. The scalar technique appeared to be the more effective procedure for teaching primary harmonic functions. (Author/SJL)

To examine individual differences in conditions accompanying attention, the cardiac change of ten normal and retarded infants was measured in response to an auditory signal over 15 trials. (Author/DLS)

Using a visual conditional stimulus and an auditory unconditional stimulus in a trace procedure, the heart rate conditioning of 16 infants ranging in age from two to seven months was evaluated. (MP)

Findings indicated that the speech training program significantly improved the auditory speech perception of the hearing impaired Ss. (DLS)

The schema hypothesis proposed by Kagan and Lewis was used to make predictions concerning the preferences of infants 3 to 14 months old for speech stimuli. An operant response method was used in determining the infants' preferences for inflected, monotone, and scrambled natural speech stimuli. (MS)

Under conditions of serial recall of auditorily presented lists of digits, recall of the last item has been shown to be adversely affected by the presence of a redundant item following the list. It is shown that the size of this effect, the suffix effect, is not influenced by the phonological complexity of the suffix. (Editor/RK)

A new procedure for estimating the dichotic ear advantage is applied for the first time in conjunction with the single-response requirement. Most subjects showed unusually large right-ear advantages, making the present methodology interesting for the study of hemispheric asymmetry. (Editor)

The rate of speaking in words per minute is a function of three independent variables, namely, articulation rate and the number and durations of pauses. The present study varies each of these components separately in a factorial design in order to determine how the listener combines them into a global impression of speech rate. (Editor)

Notes that phonemic restoration is a powerful auditory illusion. Points out that when part of an utterance is replaced by another sound, listeners perceptually restore the missing speech. Several paradigms measure this illusion and explore its bottom-up and top-down bases. Findings reveal that acoustic properties of the replacement sound strongly…

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…