The "Barton Reading & Spelling System"[R] is a one-to-one tutoring system designed to improve the reading, writing and spelling skills of children, teenagers, or adults who struggle due to dyslexia or another learning disability. Although the program is designed to be one-to-one, it may also be used in a small group setting, but each…

We investigated whether phonological deficits are a consequence of magnocellular processing deficits in dyslexic and control children. In Experiment 1, children were tested for reading ability, phonological awareness, visuo-magnocellular motion perception, and attention shifting (sometimes considered as magnocellular function). A two-step cluster…

Purpose: This study examined the perception of fundamental frequency (f0) patterns by Cantonese children with and without specific language impairment (SLI). Method: Participants were 14 five-year-old children with SLI, and 14 age-matched (AM) and 13 four-year-old vocabulary-matched (VM) controls. The children identified a word from familiar word…

A shift from language-general to language-specific sound discrimination abilities has been largely attested in different populations of infants during the second half of the first year of life; however, data are still scarce regarding bilingual populations. Previous research with 4-, 8- and 12-month-old Catalan-Spanish bilingual infants had…

By examining voice onset time (VOT) discrimination in 4- and 8-month-olds raised in a French-speaking environment, the current study addresses the question of the role played by linguistic experience in the reshaping of the initial perceptual abilities. Results showed that the language-general -30- and +30-ms VOT boundaries are better…

It has been hypothesised that auditory processing may be enhanced in autism spectrum disorders (ASD). We tested auditory discrimination ability in 72 adolescents with ASD (39 childhood autism; 33 other ASD) and 57 IQ and age-matched controls, assessing their capacity for successful discrimination of the frequency, intensity and duration…

Traditional pronunciation instruction and instruction in second language (L2) phonetics have been shown to improve learners' L2 accent in some, though certainly not all, cases. Learners in intermediate and advanced Spanish FL courses have shown modest improvement in the pronunciation of some L2 phones after receiving such instruction.…

This dissertation investigated 1) American L2 learners' perceptual ability to accurately identify Japanese pitch accent, and 2) learners' realization of Japanese pitch accent. This study was conducted to determine whether these abilities could be improved through training. Study 1 tested the ability to identify the accent location (pitch fall)…

We assessed whether 2 preschoolers with autism learned to discriminate between the sounds of musical instruments more rapidly than the spoken names of the instruments. After the children learned the sound-object relations more rapidly than the name-object relations, we then evaluated a prompt-delay procedure for transferring stimulus control from…

A novel method for initiating discrimination training with nonverbal children combines a delayed S+ procedure that requires children to refrain from responding to either of 2 physically different choice stimuli until a prompt stimulus is added onto 1 of the choices, and a delayed prompting procedure that presents the same 2-choice stimulus…

Individual differences in mental ability (MA) were examined with event-related potentials (ERP). In addition to using an auditory frequency discrimination task, a duration discrimination task was used to elicit P300 and mismatch negativity (MMN) components of the ERP. Frequency and duration P300 latencies explained 9% and 10% of variance of MAB…

This perceptual study describes changes in how listeners perceive VCV elements within successive truncations taken from an iambic phrase containing l (e.g. "a leaf", or "a load") spoken by four male speakers of General American English. Evidence of the respective roles of dorsal gestural affiliation between l and the reduced…

The purpose of this study was to compare the effect of cognitive chunking techniques among first-semester group-piano music majors. The ability to group discrete pieces of information into larger, more meaningful chunks is essential for efficient cognitive processing. Since reading keyboard music and playing the piano is a cognitively complex…

This study investigates the question of whether language background affects the perception of lexical stress in English. Thirty native English speakers and 30 native Chinese learners of English participated in a stressed-syllable identification task and a discrimination task involving three types of stimuli (real words/pseudowords/hums). The…

Persons with Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) display atypical perceptual processing in visual and auditory tasks. In vision, Bertone, Mottron, Jelenic, and Faubert (2005) found that enhanced and diminished visual processing is linked to the level of neural complexity required to process stimuli, as proposed in the neural complexity hypothesis.…