Discusses the possibility that early linguistic experience affects infant speech perception and that this effect may be of practical consequence in later language learning. (EKN)

Describes how the University of Delaware's Grade Units for Interactive Dictation (GUIDO) system is used to improve instructional delivery and educational research in aural skills development. Instruction consists of musical dictation exercises and there are five programs available in two modes--drill-and-practice and heuristic (discovery).…

Describes the development and evaluation of a computer-administered testing program for auditory discrimination in young children. (WB)

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)

A uniprocessor, unidimensional model, based on Krueger's noisy-operator theory, was fitted satisfactorily to data from four published studies of tone comparison. The model predicts faster response time on different judgments because of heterogeneity of difference. (Author/CP)

Two experiments explored factors affecting the influence of visual (lip-read) information on auditory speech perception, the "McGurk effect," in advanced learners of English as a Second Language and native speakers of English. Results demonstrate the influence of first language on the information value of the cues and audiovisual…

Twenty-four gifted children with learning disabilities and a control group of nondisabled gifted children were administered the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised. The 8- to 12-year-old subjects were found to be more reliant on verbal conceptualization and reasoning than controls and demonstrated deficiencies in short-term auditory…

Compares auditory/visual practice to visual/motor practice in spelling with seven elementary school learning-disabled students enrolled in a resource room setting. Finds that the auditory/visual practice was superior to the visual/motor practice on the weekly spelling performance for all seven students. (MG)

Critiques an investigation of the possibility of applying a Neo-Piagetian task to music. Contends that the task could be used as a criterion measure in determining a developmental sequence for auditory pitch discrimination. Details the Neo-Piagetian positions that make Piaget's theory more compatible with current cognitive psychology trends. (LS)

Using a set of fine-grained auditory discrimination tasks, 21 children with language-learning problems were compared with 21 normal children, aged six-nine. Across three years, children with language-learning problems showed poorer auditory discrimination for temporally based acoustic differences, poorer receptive vocabulary and language…

Two experiments studied whether altering an auditory stimulus' rate of change affected infants' fixation of changing visual stimuli. Results demonstrated that infants exposed simultaneously to auditory and visual stimulation showed a reduced tendency to fixate on relatively more visually stimulating events. Heart rates also accelerated during…

This study, involving 40 normal-hearing 6 year olds, substantiates the form equivalence of the Selective Auditory Attention Test. Analysis shows equal mean difficulty and significant correlations between lists in quiet and between lists presented with competing speech. (Author/JDD)

Two studies with 20 hearing-impaired and 10 normal-hearing adults found that the Hearing Performance Inventory-Revised was insensitive to differences in hearing-impaired listeners' consonant-recognition ability, whereas the Nonsense Syllable Test was sensitive to differences in overall consonant-recognition ability for normal-hearing and…