The purpose of the present study was to tease apart the paralinguistic from the linguistic aspects of infants' perception of infant-directed (ID) speech. Several studies have shown that infants beginning at a few days after birth discriminate native from nonnative speech and can discriminate specific contours (rising, falling, rising-falling) in ID speech. Some studies have also indicated that infants at 4.5 months of age prefer their own name over other names but at 6 months of age, fail to prefer a sentence with their own name embedded in it. Using a discrimination procedure, the current study investigated whether 6-month-old infants could detect a change in contour and/or a change in words when listening to ID utterances. Results indicated that 6-month-old infants detected both a contour and a word change. From these results, it is argued that as has been shown in other experiments, infants are extremely sensitive to subtle changes in speech. Furthermore, ID speech appears to facilitate infants' ability to discriminate small changes in ID speech (both linguistic and paralinguistic). It is suggested that future studies investigate more discrete changes in speech samples and a replication of this research with adult-directed (AD) speech. / Master of Science

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Diploma thesis has special education theme. This thesis deals with the auditory perception in preschool children. The goal of the work is to evaluate the level of auditory perception of children in an ordinary preschool class. We focus on listening, auditory differentiation, short-term auditory memory, auditory analysis and synthesis, and perception and reproduction of rhythm. In order to answer the research questions, we created a test which is designed in accordance to the auditory perception development tables. The results show that on average the children score 82.8 percent in the test. The most difficult part of the test is listening with the average score of 61.0 percent. On the other hand, the most successful part is the perception and reproduction of rhythm with average score of 89.2 percent. KEYWORDS Preschool Child, Communication, Auditory Perception, Listening, Word Discrimination, Short-term Auditory Memory, Phonological Segmentation and Blending, Perception and Reproduction of Rhythm