This study evaluated the peripheral and central auditory functioning (and thus the potential to perceive obstacles through reflected sound) of eight totally blind persons and eight sighted persons. The blind subjects were able to process auditory information faster than the control group. (Author/DB)

Infants who were in darkness were presented with objects that made sounds. Objects were within reach and out of reach. Infants reached into the target area more often when the object was in reach than when the object was beyond reach. Infants reached correctly in the dark for objects placed off midline. (BC)

Focuses on the relationship between loudness and intensity of sounds. (Author/PVD)

Focuses on the concepts of pitch and timbre of sounds. (PVD)

Two studies examined the effectiveness of external-speaker announcements in identifying incoming buses to 21 adults with visual impairments, including the placement of external speakers, the ability to understand simultaneous bus announcements, and the speech enhancement of announcements. Announcements could be heard above ambient traffic sounds…

This rejoinder to a critique of the authors' research on speech perception deficits in poor readers answers the specific criticisms and reaffirms their conclusion that the difficulty some poor readers have with rapid /ba/-/da/ discrimination does not stem from difficulty in discriminating the rapid spectral transitions at stop-vowel syllable…

To examine possible explanations of reported inaccuracies of children with specific language impairment (SLI) on nonword repetition, study compared repetitions of 54 SLI children and peers for number and type of error, latency, and duration of response. Found no evidence of differences between groups in auditory discrimination or response…

In this study, eight young adolescents with dyslexia were compared to age-matched controls on a number of speech and non-speech auditory tasks. Children with dyslexia had significantly higher thresholds in backward masking for bandpass noise than did control participants, but differed in no other way. (Contains references.) (Author/CR)

Six experiments investigated infants' sensitivity to numerosity in auditory sequences. In prior studies (Lipton & Spelke, 2003), 6-month-old infants discriminated sequences of 8 versus 16 but not 8 versus 12 sounds, and 9-month-old infants discriminated 8 versus 12 but not 8 versus 10 sounds, when the continuous variables of rate, sound duration,…

In earlier studies with rats, the effectiveness of the auditory element of a tone--light discriminative stimulus was enhanced when the conditioned incentive value of the compound was negative rather than positive. The present experiment systematically replicated these results in pigeons trained to press a treadle in the presence of a tone--light…

Purpose: Some researchers have assessed ear-specific performance of auditory processing ability using speech recognition tasks with normative data based on diotic administration. The present study investigated whether monotic and diotic administrations yield similar results using the Selective Auditory Attention Test. Method: Seventy-two typically…

Single case studies are a valuable means of providing information about the outcomes of speech and language intervention. Many previous studies have used phonological analysis as a theoretical basis, while others have used psycholinguistic models. The present study combines these approaches to assessment, intervention and evaluation of outcomes.…

This article traces the development of the concept of "audism" from its inception in the mid-1970s by exploring three distinct dimensions of oppression: individual, institutional, and metaphysical. Although the first two aspects of audism have been identified, there is a deeply rooted belief system regarding language and human identity that is yet…

A central question in psycholinguistic research is how listeners isolate words from connected speech despite the paucity of clear word-boundary cues in the signal. A large body of empirical evidence indicates that word segmentation is promoted by both lexical (knowledge-derived) and sublexical (signal-derived) cues. However, an account of how…

An event-related brain potential experiment was carried out to investigate the temporal relationship between lexical selection and the semantic integration in auditory sentence processing. Participants were presented with spoken sentences that ended with a word that was either semantically congruent or anomalous. Information about the moment in…