Infants (n=34) were tested on a speech-sound discrimination-in-noise task using the visual reinforcement of infant speech discrimination procedure. An adult control group was also tested. The infant-adult difference in discrimination threshold in noise was 6.9 dB. Advantages of this adaptive threshold procedure and possible applications are noted.…

Results indicated that in both adults and infants combined cues facilitate discrimination of the phonemic contrast regardless of whether the cues cooperate or conflict. The three experiments did not support a phonetic interpretation of conflicting/cooperating cues for the perception of final stop consonant voicing. (Author/DB)

Comparison of the auditory frequency resolving ability of preschool children, school-aged children, and adults found data from children as young as three-years-old that were qualitatively indistinguishable from adult data though threshold estimates from young children were more variable from run to run than from adults. Increasing age improved…

This study found correlations (.45 to .59) between scores on a battery of auditory discrimination tasks and measures of intelligence and academic aptitude in two samples of college students. An implication is that intelligence is a potential confounding variable in studies of the auditory perceptual abilities of various clinical populations.…

This investigation examined the response strategies and discrimination accuracy of adults and children (aged 5-10) as the ratio of same to different trials was varied across 3 conditions of an auditory discrimination task. All subjects changed response strategies depending on the ratio of same-to-different trials. (DB)

The ability of 10 normal-speaking 5-year-olds and 10-normal-speaking 7-year-olds to categorize consonants as "dripping" (stop), "flowing" (fricative), "tongue" (lingual place of articulation), "or "lip" (labial place of articulation) was evaluated. Children's ability to categorize was evaluated as an indicator of their awareness of feature…

This study evaluated the ability of 30 normally developing children (ages 6-12) to report the perceived location of a stationary fused auditory image (FAI) or track a "moving" FAI. Although subjects performed at normal adult levels with the stationary sound measure, they exhibited a significant age-related trend with the moving sound…

Comparison of 48 cerebral palsied individuals (aged 10-18), either with impaired speech or normal speech, found speech-impaired subjects were able to discriminate phoneme contrasts adequately in a word judgment task but performed less well on a phoneme discrimination "same-different" task possibly resulting from a weak memory for novel…

This study, which assessed hypothesis-testing abilities using a discrimination-learning paradigm, found that 16 language-impaired primary-level children solved fewer problems than 16 controls equated on cognitive level, but the 2 groups used similar hypothesis types to solve the problems. Type of verbal feedback (explicit versus nonexplicit) did…

This study, with 161 children with and without language learning problems, tested the hypothesis that as children's language development matures, factor-analytic structural changes occur that are associated with measurements of fine-grained auditory discrimination, receptive vocabulary, receptive language, speech production, and 3 performance…