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…

There is a growing consensus that developmental dyslexia is associated with a phonological-core deficit. One symptom of this phonological deficit is a subtle speech-perception deficit. The auditory basis of this deficit is still hotly debated. If people with dyslexia, however, do not have an auditory deficit and perceive the underlying acoustic…

A growing body of research has documented effects of phonotactic probability on young children's nonword repetition. This study extends this research in 2 ways. First, it compares nonword repetitions by 40 young children with phonological disorders with those by 40 same-age peers with typical phonological development on a nonword repetition task…

The present study investigated the possible role of ceiling effects in producing laterality effects of small magnitude in dichotic emotion detection. Twenty two right-handed undergraduate students participated in the present experiment. They were required to detect the presence of a target emotion in the expressions tones of happiness, sadness,…

In face-to-face conversation speech is perceived by ear and eye. We studied the prerequisites of audio-visual speech perception by using perceptually ambiguous sine wave replicas of natural speech as auditory stimuli. When the subjects were not aware that the auditory stimuli were speech, they showed only negligible integration of auditory and…

Previous studies have failed to demonstrate lexically induced delays in phoneme recognition, casting doubt on interactive models of speech perception. We present TRACE simulations that explain these failures: previously tested conditions failed to produce lexically induced delay effects because the input was too unambiguous and the control…

The octave illusion (D. Deutsch, 1974) occurs when 2 tones separated by an octave are alternated repeatedly, such that when the right ear receives the high tone, the left ear receives the low tone, and vice versa. Most subjects in the original study reported hearing a single tone that alternated from ear to ear, whose pitch also alternated from…

In 2 experiments, a novel experimental paradigm investigated how spatial attention is distributed across a talker's face during auditory-visual speech discourse processing. Dots were superimposed onto several talkers' faces for 17-msec durations on the talker's left side, mouth, right side, and eyebrow area. Participants reported the locations of…

Level-invariant detection refers to findings that thresholds in tone-in-noise detection are unaffected by roving-level procedures that degrade energy cues. Such data are inconsistent with ideas that detection is based on the energy passed by an auditory filter. A hypothesis that detection is based on a level-invariant temporal cue is advanced.…