In the present experiment, the authors tested Mandarin and English listeners on a range of auditory tasks to investigate whether long-term linguistic experience influences the cognitive processing of nonspeech sounds. As expected, Mandarin listeners identified Mandarin tones significantly more accurately than English listeners; however,…

This paper considers the process by which humans are able to select from the complex string of sounds impinging on the ear and understand certain frequency combinations to be linguistic signals while other combinations are not. A brief review of the complex subcortical region, particularly the known but seldom studied reticular system, indicates…

This volume contains the papers which were presented and a summary of the discussions which took place at a conference sponsored by the Study Group on Spelling Disability in Children at the School of Education, University of Birmingham (England). The papers discuss such topics as spelling in context, the nature of the writing system and its…

The discrimination of minimally paired speech sounds by seven severely retarded children (mean age 3.2 years, and mean IQ 38.4) was compared with the discrimination performance of eight normally developing 7-month-old infants. (Author/PHR)

The purpose of this experiment was to compare components of the human and rat auditory event-related potential (ERP) in a serial feature-positive discrimination task. Subjects learned to respond to an auditory target stimulus when it followed a visual feature (X [right arrow] A+), but to not respond when it was presented alone (A-). Upon solving…

This experiment investigated relational complexity and relational shift in judgments of auditory patterns. Pitch and duration values were used to construct two-note perceptually similar sequences (unary relations) and four-note relationally similar sequences (binary relations). It was hypothesized that 5-, 8- and 11-year-old children would perform…

Two experiments, a shadowing task and a mispronunciation-detection task, were performed to investigate the interactions between the data-driven primary speech perception process and the knowledge-driven word recognition process in the comprehension of continuous speech. Results are applied to an active direct access model of word recognition.…

The relationship between psychometric intelligence and rapid acoustic information processing was explored in two experiments using college students. Group differences occurred in threshold interstimulus intervals required for recognition and in speed. Results were interpreted as indicating better information processing efficiency (higher…

Argues that due to unfamiliarity with certain English sounds, Spanish-speaking children may be hampered in learning initial decoding skills necessary for developing fluent reading. Concludes that a brief ear-training program for the development of overall auditory discrimination can be beneficial to such children. (FL)

Children 7, 9, 11, 13, and 15 years of age were tested on their ability to identify simultaneous and time-staggered dichotic consonant-vowel stimuli. (JBM)

ASSUMING THAT SPEECH IS THE RESULT OF A NUMBER OF DISCRETE NEUROMUSCULAR EVENTS AND THAT THE BRAIN CAN STORE ONLY A LIMITED NUMBER OF MOTOR COMMANDS WITH WHICH TO CONTROL THESE EVENTS, THE RESEARCH REPORTED IN THIS PAPER WAS DIRECTED TO A DETERMINATION OF THE SIZE AND NATURE OF THE STORED ITEMS AND AN EXPLANATION OF HOW SPEAKERS ENCODE A SEQUENCE…

False recognition responses of high and low SES kindergarten subjects to associatively and acoustically related words were measured. Acoustic attribute dominance for all subjects, and relatively greater acoustic attribute dominance for low SES subjects was predicted. Results indicated that subjects encoded on both attribute dimensions, with low…

Reports a study which shows that subjects can make discriminative judgments of a speaker's height and weight from his tape recorded speech. This ability is not altered by the filtering of the speech signal. (PMJ)