This study is limited standardization of the "Children's Speechreading Test" designed by Dr. Dolores S. Butt of the University of New Mexico. After studying the development of language skills in young acoustically handicapped children, she randomly selected subjects from 10 nursery schools and primary departments of schools for the deaf and administered her test to these children. The purpose of the present study is to provide a limited standardization of the "Children's speechreading Test" on normal hearing children. Although Dr. Butt indicates some relation of her test to intelligence, no attempt was made in this pilot study to correlate mental ability with speechreading ability. The "children's Speechreading Test" reproduced in complete form in Appendix A, was administered to 20 normal hearing children, all of whom were in the first grade. Information in the form of raw scores was then to utilized in calculating the standard deviation and percentile scores. Information gained from administering the test was also to be utilized to predict further investigation regarding the usefulness of this test. In addition a further purpose of this pilot project was to compile the materials necessary for administration of the test for future use in the Portland State University Speech and Hearing Clinic.

No description available.

The investigator evaluated a commercially available Spanish word recognition ability test. The material consists of four lists of fifty bisyllabic tetraphonemic Spanish words available from Auditec of St. Louis as: "Spanish speech discrimination lists 1-4". Interlist equivalence, word difficulty, speaker's intelligibility, and P/I functions' slopes were investigated. Taped lists were presented to 16 normal hearing native Spanish speaking adults at four presentation levels. Statistical analysis indicated that the intelligibility of list three is significantly different than the other lists at the.05 level. At the low presentation levels, subjects of Mexican origin obtained better scores than subjects of other nationalities. The P/I functions' slope (4.3%) was comparable to that obtained by investigators of English tests. Most frequently missed words have as common denominators: presence of the /s/ sound, and are words that retain their meaning even after deletion of final /s/. Talker's speech intelligibility was judged to be very clear.

It is well established that anticipation of the arrival of an expected stimulus is accompanied by rich ongoing oscillatory neurodynamics, which span and link large areas of cortex. An intriguing possibility is that these dynamic interactions may convey knowledge that is embodied by large-scale neurocognitive networks from higher level regions of multi-model cortex to lower level primary sensory areas. In the current study, using autoregressive spectral analysis, we establish that during the anticipatory phase of a visual discrimination task there are rich patterns of coherent interaction between various levels of the ventral visual hierarchy across the frequency spectrum of 8 - 90 Hz. Using spectral Granger causality we determined that a subset of these interactions carry beta frequency (14 - 30 Hz) top-down influences from higher level visual regions V4 and TEO to primary visual cortex. We investigated the functional significance of these top-down interactions by correlating the magnitude of the anticipatory signals with the amplitude of the visual evoked potential that was elicited by stimulus processing. We found that in one third of the extrastriate-striate pairs, tested in three monkeys, the amplitude of the visual evoked response is well predicted by the magnitude of pre-stimulus coherent top-down anticipatory influences. To investigate the dynamics of the coherent and topdown Granger causal interactions, we analyzed the relationship between coherence and top-down Granger causality with stimulus onset asynchrony. This analysis revealed that in an abundance of cases the magnitudes of the coherent interactions and top-down directional influences scaled with the length of time that had elapsed before stimulus onset. / Together these results reveal a complex network of coherent and top-down directional interactions that predict the amplitude of early components of the visual evoked potential in primary visual cortex and vary in strength on the basis of the length of the stimulus onset. / by Craig G. Richter. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2009. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2009. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

No description available.

No description available.

Childrens' spatial ability has been studied from developmental and differential psychology orientations and by information-processing theorists. No unified means of examining spatial ability has been attempted by investigators. The focus of this research is thus based on the integration of developmental predictions with a processing model created to generate and test hypotheses regarding certain spatial competencies of young children. Of primary interest was how young children perform depending on the dimensionality of the spatial materials utilized in the experimental task. One hundred and sixty 4 and 6 year old children were randomly selected for one of four treatment conditions with age and sex distributed equally in each condition. Spatial materials were presented in either two or three dimensions and subjects were required to judge whether a response item also presented in two or three dimensions matched the stimulus display. Across-versus within-dimensional performance was therefore compared in a single study. Five displays were presented ranging in difficulty from simple to complex. Response materials consisted of a correct match on the stimulus item and four error types. Types of errors included a geometric violation (in which the objects in the display were unconnected at one point), a depth violation (lack of the depth dimension), a 90° or 270° rotation violation and a 180° violation. These last two violations were considered orientation errors similar to those children exhibit on perspective-taking tasks. Three separate analyses of variance were performed on the data. Results from each of these analyses indicated that six year old children significantly outperformed four year olds in all conditions. However, of importance to developmental psychology was the finding that all subjects performed as well as they did on a task thought to be quite difficult. Also reiterated in these analyses was the result that within-dimensional performance was significantly better than across-dimensional ability for all subjects. Analysis of display complexity revealed that there was differential success for the subjects based on the complexity of the display. Errors analysis indicated that the rotation and reflection foils created the most difficulty for subjects. This finding was reiterated in the Age X Foil Type interaction and Sex X Stimulus Dimension X Response Dimension X Foil Type interaction, in which four year olds' relative inability to perform on these errors as compared to six year olds was shown. This suggests that the ability to correctly discriminate orientation occurs late in the developmental sequence. While no main effect for sex was indicated by any of the analyses, there was an interesting finding as a result of the Sex X Stimulus Dimension X Response Dimension X Foil Type interaction. When across-dimension performance was examined, it was found that males made relatively more errors of an orientation type than females, exhibiting a possible lack of attention to the provided facilitative reference frame. Results were further discussed in terms of predictions from the hypothetical model and in regard to developmental issues. Limitations of the work were also discussed.

This thesis used the electroencephalogram (EEG) to measure the electrophysiological correlates of auditory distraction. Chapter One determined that relative to broad-band noise, the presence of a continuous speech signal impaired task performance, attenuated the N1 peak and reduced theta/alpha band inter-trial phase coherence around the latency of the N1. Chapter Two found that reductions of inter-trial phase coherence during distraction were related to both disruptions of gain and the temporal fidelity of evoked responses. Chapter Three found that postsecondary adults with ADHD are not characterized by greater levels of distraction and that this population may be responding to sensory events with abnormally high phase locking. Chapter Three also found that Un-medicated ADHD adults had significantly more N1 latency, theta/alpha band evoked power than Medicated ADHD or Control groups. These results extend the literature on distraction by using time-frequency measures to assess how distraction modulates early sensory processing of stimulus events. / xxii, 171 p. : col. ill. ; 29 cm

No description available.

This research consisted of three individual studies, examining intra- and inter-modal haptic and visual processing in able learners and reading disabled children spanning the elementary school grades. / Performance was measured in terms of: accuracy scores, haptic exploration scores, and exploration times. Higher scores were obtained on the intra-modal visual condition than on any of the conditions involving a haptic component. Increasing the exploration times for haptic stimuli did not significantly improve performance on tasks involving a haptic component. / Performance scores of poor readers were depressed on all tasks, suggesting a general deficit in sensory processing rather than an inter-sensory processing deficit. Poor readers further employed less sophisticated haptic exploration strategies than able readers, suggesting use of less efficient task strategies.