Deaf children exposed to Cued Speech (CS), either before age two (early) or later at school (late), were presented with pseudowords with and without CS. The main goal was to establish the way in which lipreading and CS combine to produce unitary percepts, similar to audiovisual integration in speech perception, when participants are presented with…

Recent neuroimaging studies and neuropsychological data suggest that there are regions in posterior auditory cortex that participate both in speech perception and speech production. An outstanding question is whether the same neural regions support both perception and production or whether there exist discrete cortical fields subserving these…

In three experiments, participants listened for a target's pitch change within recurrent nine-tone patterns having largely isochronous rhythms. Patterns differed in pitch structure of initial (context) and final (target distance) pattern segments. Also varied were: probe timing (Experiments 2 and 3) and instructions about probe timing (Experiments…

Using electopalatography, this study investigated the production of sibilants produced by four adults who have severe-to-profound hearing loss and four speakers with normal hearing. Each speaker wore a Rion[R] semi-flexible electroplate while producing multiple repetitions of the utterances "see, sue, she, shoe." The speakers' productions were…

Two experiments used a magnitude estimation paradigm to test whether perception of disfluency is a function of whether the speaker and the listener stutter or do not stutter. Utterances produced by people who stutter were judged as "less fluent," and, critically, this held for apparently fluent utterances as well as for utterances…

Phonotactic probability, a measure of the likelihood of occurrence of a sound sequence, appears to facilitate noun learning (H. L. Storkel, 2001). Nouns and verbs, however, tend to differ in rate of acquisition, indicating that word-learning mechanisms may differ across grammatical class. The purpose of the current study was to examine the effect…

Most studies have been unable to identify reliable acoustic cues for the recognition of the English nonsibilant fricatives /f, v, [theta], [eth]/. The present study was designed to test the extent to which the perception of these fricatives by normal-hearing adults is based on other sources of information, namely, linguistic context and visual…

This paper describes research investigating the perception of intrusive music, that is, music heard when choice, volume, and occurrence are not under the control of the participant. Participants were directed to record diary accounts of episodes in which music was played in instances when they were not in control of the decision to play the music…

Recent work suggests that once the auditory cortex of deaf persons has been reorganized by cross-modal plasticity, it can no longer respond to signals from a cochlear implant (CI) installed subsequently. To further examine this issue, we compared the evoked potentials involved in the processing of visual stimuli between CI users and hearing…

We investigated the effect of legato and staccato articulation styles on the perception of modulated tempos. Ninety music majors served as participants. Listeners heard music examples that had been selected from two pieces, each of which included staccato and legato passages. Excerpts were presented to listeners in three conditions of tempo…

Few studies have examined the ability of individuals with learning disabilities, in general, or with Down syndrome, specifically, to discriminate speech. The purpose of this study was compare the speech discrimination abilities of eight children with Down syndrome (aged 5.7 to 12.8 years) to seven nonverbal mental-age matched controls (aged 4.0 to…

We tested categorical perception and speech-in-noise perception in a group of five-year-old preschool children genetically at risk for dyslexia, compared to a group of well-matched control children and a group of adults. Both groups of children differed significantly from the adults on all speech measures. Comparing both child groups, the risk…

Regardless of the extremely subtle acoustic changes that are perceptible within almost all perception research studies, it is the total overall effect that generally occupies each individual listener. A long line of research indicates that many subtle "music changes" are often not perceived accurately and are actually mistakenly identified.…

Joseph Coencas shows scenes from films to help special education students improve their visual and auditory skills, build confidence in their abilities to talk about and analyze the components of a narrative, and feel comfortable engaging in class discussion and writing. He also encourages students to pursue their interests in subjects they have…

There is now a renewed emphasis in the UK on short intensive interventions to tackle reading failure. In this paper we report on the effect of a programme based on a view that reading problems are associated with the inability of the learner to deal with speech at the level of individual speech sounds even though they may be fully competent in the…