An understanding of the linguistic differences of black and Puerto Rican children will better prepare the teacher to cope with the language learning situation. (Authors)

Describes research results showing that letter-name knowledge does not aid the beginning reader in pronouncing words composed of the same letters. Suggests that letter-sound knowledge does have a beneficial effect. Bibliography. (RW)

Based on Huntington's Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University. Adapted from paper presented at Convention of American Speech and Hearing Association (36, Los Angeles, Calif., Nov., 1960).

Training programs for auditory and for visual figure-ground perception were constructed and tested with brain-damaged and mentally retarded children. Training groups showed higher gain scores than the control group on both tests, but the effect was significant only for visual training on visual figure-ground perception. (Author/SJL)

Addresses questions about infant perceptual ability and the possibility of its decline as a function of development in the absence of specific experience. Compares English-speaking adults, Hindi-speaking adults, and 7-month-old infants on their ability to discriminate two pairs of natural Hindi (non-English) speech contrasts. (Author/RH)

Head turning to off-centered sound was videotaped monthly for 13 infants during their first three months of life. (JMB)

Compared good and poor spellers at the third- and sixth-grade levels on seven tasks that measured visual and auditory discrimination, memory, analysis and synthesis skills. Results indicated tasks discriminated between good and poor spellers at the third-grade level and sixth-grade level. (Author)

Results of discriminating and monitoring tasks indicate that performance deteriorates over time when a specific object must be distinguished from previously presented nonspecific objects in a display which changes quickly. The results offer a basis for distinguishing between perceptual and response processes underlying the vigilance decrement.…

This study confirms the hypothesis that poor children's difficulties with sounds stem not from deficiencies in auditory discrimination but from inadequate skill in phonemic analysis. Almost all of disadvantaged and middle-class kindergarten-age children could readily hear phoneme differences in words. Almost all of the disadvantaged children, but…

Five studies examined the contributions of syllable-ordering and rhythmic properties of syllable strings to 6- and 9-month-old infants' speech segmentation. Results indicate that the capacity for integrating multiple sources of information in speech perception emerges between 6 and 9 months, in rough synchrony with the emergence of integration in…

Studied the ability of 8- and 11-year olds, and college-age subjects, to allocate attention rapidly. Older subjects were better able to reallocate attention. The developmental change in the reallocation of attention appears to be continuous and quantitative. Improvement is linked to the ability to use active attentional strategies. (Author/GH)

This study examined the abilities of 18 adults with familial dyslexia to use steady state, dynamic, and temporal cues in synthetic speech continua. Although subjects were able to label and discriminate the continua, they did not necessarily use acoustic cues in the same manner as did normal readers, and their overall performance was less accurate.…