The purposes of this study were to assess the effect of phoneme-grapheme consistency (PGC) and cue emphasis (CE) on the development of decoding skills in first graders and to determine the relationship of consistency of original lists to the recognition of new words. Subjects were 162 first graders, mean age 6.11 years and scoring above 30 on the…

A model of phoneme identification is proposed which describes the process by which continuous acoustic featural information about the place of articulation and the voicing of speech sounds is integrated during phoneme identification. (AM)

Research indicates that the Wallach and Wallach tutorial reading program for low-readiness first graders which emphasizes phoneme identification skills is effective. (MKM)

In order to examine the extent to which adult judgments of first words depend on visual and auditory cues, spontaneous utterances were collected for boys and girls ages one year, five months to one year, ten months. Adults named the same toys. The older the speaker, the less perception was affected by visual context. (Author/SW)

To help you keep current in the ever-changing world of teaching. (Editor)

The auditory receptive language skills of 40 learning disabled (LD) and 40 non-disabled boys (all 7 - 11 years old) were assessed via computerized versions of subtests of the Goldman-Fristoe-Woodcock Auditory Skills Test Battery. The computerized assessment correctly identified 92.5% of the LD group and 65% of the normal control children. (DB)

Investigated the influence of melodic activity (ornamented and plain) on students' perception of tempo. Third, fifth, and sixth graders indicated whether the tempo of the second example in each paired comparison item was faster, slower, or stayed the same. Suggests that tempo perception lessons be preceded by instruction on melodic activity and…

Presents a study that investigated the significance of the octave-equivalence assumption, an essential assumption to the notion of "pitch class" and the analysis and pedagogy of all music in the Western tradition. Discusses development and organization of experimental items and describes the method of presentation. (GEA)

Examines alert newborn and five-month-old infants' responsivity to variations in spectral composition of a rattle sound. Head orientation and cardiac responses to sound were recorded. Heart rate change did not vary as a function of frequency at either age, suggesting that all stimuli were equally effective in eliciting the infant's attention.…

Because young children have poorer auditory temporal resolution than older children, a study measured the auditory filters of two 6-year-olds, two 10-year-olds, and two adults by having them detect a 400-ms sinusoid centered in a spectral notch in a band of noise. (HOD)

Examines results of a study of samples of babbling production of 6, 8, and 10-month-old infants from French, Arabic, and Cantonese backgrounds. Various judges were asked to identify those infants from their own linguistics community, with the intention of supporting hypothesis of an early influence on babbling of metaphonological characteristics…

Two studies were conducted, one to judge the relative ages of pairs of vocalizations from Chinese and American infants of varying ages, the other to judge the linguistic community of the vocalizer when age was held constant. Judgments were highly accurate in the first study, but not in the second. (Author/RM)

Elementary school children were exposed to a series of modeled, tape-recorded sentences; those containing nongrammatical prepositional constructions were always vicariously rewarded, while the remaining, grammatically correct, background sentences were not. (Editor)

By means of a multiple discrimination function analysis it is possible to reject the hypothesis that musicality, as measured by the tests in Wing's battery, is entirely influenced by hereditary factors. (Author)