The ability of university music majors to aurally perceive sudden and gradual tempo changes of various magnitudes was investigated. Subjects detected tempo changes better when the change was increased rather than decreased for one composition, sudden rather than gradual, greater rather than smaller in magnitude, and one-directional rather than…

Study examined native Japanese speakers at two levels of English language experience and compared performance to native American-English speakers to determine whether Japanese-English bilinguals with intensive experience conversing with native English speakers would identify and discriminate /r/ and /l/ perception. Concludes that native Japanese…

Threshold variability across repeated measures (N=10) was observed at 250 and 1,000 Hz with five severely hearing-impaired preschool children. Results indicated that variability at 1,000 Hz was within a 10 dB range (except for one measure) across Ss, while variability at 250 Hz was substantially larger, even though false positive responses to…

This study compared the auditory lexical decision times of children (N=46, mean age=7) with specific language impairment (SLI) to those of typically developing age peers. Although SLI children were significantly slower than peers, speed of word recognition was not correlated with measures of language comprehension for the SLI group. Possible…

Twenty-four children (ages 6-10) with language impairment (LI) and 22 without participated in a study of discrimination, identification, and serial ordering of highly dissimilar and similar vowels. Children with LI were less accurate in several tasks and were found to experience auditory perception deficits which led to less robust central…

Recorded electroencephalographic activity of infants and adults who heard 1 unique tone in a series of 10 tones. The amplitude of event-related brain potentials in response to the unique tone was smaller, and its latency longer, for infants than for adults. Evoked potentials remained stable across trials. (BC)

Auditory filter widths for six groups of subjects, adults and children, were tested with fixed signal level (psychophysical tuning curve procedure) and fixed masker (notched noise procedure). Found that auditory filter widths from ages six to adult were not significantly different, and auditory deficits that appear as a function of age likely…

Musically tone-deaf individuals have psychophysical deficits in detecting pitch changes, yet their discrimination of intonation contours in speech appears to be normal. One hypothesis for this dissociation is that intonation contours use coarse pitch contrasts which exceed the pitch-change detection thresholds of tone-deaf individuals (Peretz &…

This study investigated multisensory interactions in the perception of auditory and visual motion. When auditory and visual apparent motion streams are presented concurrently in opposite directions, participants often fail to discriminate the direction of motion of the auditory stream, whereas perception of the visual stream is unaffected by the…

The present study investigated the influence of acoustical characteristics on the implicit learning of statistical regularities (transition probabilities) in sequences of musical timbres. The sequences were constructed in such a way that the acoustical dissimilarities between timbres potentially created segmentations that either supported (S1) or…

The effect of prior otitis media with effusion (OME) or current middle ear effusion (MEE) on phonetic perception was examined by testing infants' discrimination of "boo" and "goo" syllables in 2 test sessions. Middle ear function was assessed following each perception test using tympanometry. Perceptual performance was compared…

Listeners with sensorineural hearing loss have well-documented elevated hearing thresholds; reduced auditory dynamic ranges; and reduced spectral (or frequency) resolution that may reduce speech intelligibility, especially in the presence of competing sounds. Amplification and amplitude compression partially compensate for elevated thresholds and…

This study builds on the concept that aural-written verification helps L2 learners develop auditory discrimination skills, refine word recognition and gain awareness of form-meaning relationships, by comparing two modes of aural input: reading while listening (R/L) vs. listening only (L/O). Two test tasks (sequencing and gap filling) of 95 items,…

20 auditory activities that train your students' ears and raise awareness. (Editor)