Charles Watson

• AB, PhD
• CEO at Communication Disorders Technology Inc

Masked sentence perception by hearing-aid users is strongly correlated with three variables: (1) the ability to hear phonetic details as estimated by the identification of syllable constituents in quiet or in noise; (2) the ability to use situational context that is extrinsic to the speech signal; and (3) the ability to use inherent context provide...

Masked sentence perception by hearing-aid users is strongly correlated with three variables: (1) the ability to hear phonetic details as estimated by the identification of syllable constituents in quiet or in noise; (2) the ability to use situational context that is extrinsic to the speech signal; and (3) the ability to use inherent context provide...

One extension of Fechner’s (1860) methods by which the influence of sensory stimuli on human observers could be quantified in physical units, sometimes termed a "new psychophysics" was Stevens (1938) theory and methodology of perceived magnitude estimation that attempted to bridge the gap between sensation and perception. A more far-reaching second...

Preliminary analyses of interrelations among variables that correlate with measures of speech perception by aided listeners with mild-to-moderately-severe age-related hearing loses are described. The SPATS Group of nearly 120 hearing-aid users was trained in quiet and noise to identify syllable-constituents and to identify words in simple sentences...

The abilities of 59 adult hearing-aid users to hear phonetic details were assessed by measuring their abilities to identify syllable constituents in quiet and in differing levels of noise (12-talker babble) while wearing their aids. The set of sounds consisted of 109 frequently occurring syllable constituents (45 onsets, 28 nuclei, and 36 codas) sp...

Background: The sooner people receive treatment for hearing loss (HL), the quicker they are able to recognize speech and to master hearing aid technology. Unfortunately, a majority of people with HL wait until their impairments have progressed from moderate to severe levels before seeking auditory rehabilitation. To increase the number of individu...

Objective: The Dutch digits-in-noise test (NL DIN) and the American-English version (US DIN) are speech-in-noise tests for diagnostic and clinical usage. The present study investigated differences between NL DIN and US DIN speech reception thresholds (SRTs) for a group of native Dutch-speaking listeners. Design: In experiment 1, a repeated-measu...

Following an overview of theoretical issues in speech-perception training and of previous efforts to enhance hearing aid use through training, a multisite study, designed to evaluate the efficacy of two types of computerized speech-perception training for adults who use hearing AIDS, is described. One training method focuses on the identification o...

The National Hearing Test (NHT) is a telephone-administered screen for hearing loss (Watson et al., J. Am. Acad. Audiol., 2012) that obtains thresholds for three-digit sequences in a noise background. The NHT has been validated by comparing threshold SNR values to mean pure-tone loss. During five weeks in 2014 the NHT was offered without charge to...

Background: Several European countries have demonstrated successful use of telephone screening tests for auditory function. The screening test consists of spoken three-digit sequences presented in a noise background. The speech-to-noise ratios of the stimuli are determined by an adaptive tracking method that converges on the level required to achi...

A telephone-administered screening test for sensorineural hearing loss was made publically available in the United States in September 2013. This test is similar to the digits-in-noise test developed by Smits and colleagues in the Netherlands, versions of which are now in use in most European countries and in Australia. The test was initially offer...

Among the interests of Kewley-Port have been the perception and production of English Speech Sounds by native speakers of other languages. ESL students from four language backgrounds (Arabic, Chinese, Korean, and Spanish) were enrolled in a speech perception training program. Similarities and differences between these L1 groups in their primary con...

A graphical response was used to establish equivalent binaural time- and intensity-differences in auditory lateralization. For intensity differences less than about 4.5 db a constant equivalence of approximately 60 µ sec. per db is found, for 500 cps tonal pulses. For larger intensity differences more time per db is required.

Millions of adult learners have acquired good-to-excellent literacy in English, but most of them continue to have difficulty with oral communication in that language. The more obvious their problem is with pronunciation, which varies from just noticeably "foreign" to very difficult to understand, the less apparent, but possibly fundamental to their...

Background: An estimated 36 million US citizens have impaired hearing, but nearly half of them have never had a hearing test. As noted by a recent National Institutes of Health/National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIH/NIDCD) Working Group, "In the United States (in contrast to many other nations) there are no readily a...

Adult students of foreign languages frequently claim that native speakers of that language speak too rapidly. This is likely a result of the students' failure to achieve automaticity in recognition of speech sounds necessary for effortless speech perception. Research on the time course of auditory perceptual learning for both speech and non-speech...

A new approach to computer-based speech training is described. The ISTRA system is being developed as a training aid, intended for use by speech-language pathologists and teachers of the deaf. The system consists of a microcomputer equipped with a low-cost, speaker-dependent speech recognizer, and a series of programs for use in various phases of s...

The SPATS software system, originally developed for the hearing-impaired, has been modified for use with ESL learners with TOFEL (pbt) scores near and well above 500. SPATS-ESL includes the identification of syllable constituents: onsets, nuclei, and codas, as well as sentence recognition. The syllable constituent tasks include the progressive intr...

SPATS-ESL evolved as it was used by volunteers and as a supplement to classes in the Intensive English and English Enhancement Programs at Indiana University (Bloomington). These trials with eighty ESL-learners representing 12 L1s resulted in the curriculum described in the companion poster. Before training, the ESL learners exhibited significant p...

Computer software (L2L) is being developed for comprehensive perception training of English by second language learners. Our goal is to facilitate generalization of post-training improvement of phoneme perception to the perception of running speech. Three studies are reported for two groups of adult listeners, one Korean and the other Spanish. In s...

SPATS is evaluated as a testing and training system for users of hearing-aids (HAs) and cochlear-implants (CIs). Criterion measures include the HINT, CNC tests, W22 tests, Cox's CDT, parts of Gatehouse & Noble's SSQ and a special SPATS questionnaire. SPATS measures include the identification of syllable constituents (onsets and nuclei) in...

In the first section of this two-part article, several lines of research on auditory perceptual learning were shown to support the proposition that users of hearing aids and cochlear implants would benefit from systematic training on the new “speech code” represented by the modified sounds they experience through those devices. Research also sugges...

In this first section of a two-part article we offer an overview of research on listeners' abilities to learn to hear the spectral-temporal details of simple and complex sounds, both speech and non-speech. In the second article, to appear in the October issue of The Hearing Journal, we will describe a new training system based on that science that...

Fourteen volunteer students, with first languages other than English and enrolled in English pronunciation classes, used a specialized software program, the "Speech Perception Assessment and Training System (SPATS)." The software was made available in a language laboratory for seven weeks. Students used the program between 3 and 19 hours, the mean...

IntroductionCategories of Complex SoundsAuditory Perceptual LearningStimulus UncertaintyAuditory Warning SignalsNeeded ResearchReferences

The goal was to determine whether the ability to learn complex auditory discrimination and identification tasks could be predicted from performance on a screening test battery. The screening battery included auditory tasks chosen on the basis of earlier factor‐analytic studies of individual differences [Kidd et al. JASA 122, 418–435 (2007)], visual...

A software system, SPATS (patent pending), that tests and trains important bottom-up and combined bottom-up/top-down speech-perception skills is described. Bottom-up skills are the abilities to identify the constituents of syllables: onsets, nuclei, and codas in quiet and noise as produced by eight talkers. Top-down skills are the abilities to use...

Four experiments investigated the acoustical correlates of similarity and categorization judgments of environmental sounds. In Experiment 1, similarity ratings were obtained from pairwise comparisons of recordings of 50 environmental sounds. A three-dimensional multidimensional scaling (MDS) solution showed three distinct clusterings of the sounds,...

Four experiments investigated the acoustical correlates of similarity and categorization judgments of environmental sounds. In Experiment 1, similarity ratings were obtained from pairwise comparisons of recordings of 50 environmental sounds. A three-dimensional multidimensional scaling (MDS) solution showed three distinct clusterings of the sounds,...

Performance on 19 auditory discrimination and identification tasks was measured for 340 listeners with normal hearing. Test stimuli included single tones, sequences of tones, amplitude-modulated and rippled noise, temporal gaps, speech, and environmental sounds. Principal components analysis and structural equation modeling of the data support the...

The faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and doctoral graduates of Indiana University (IU) in Bloomington, Indiana have played a significant role in the history of the field of psychological and physiological acoustics, especially since 1960. The department of Psychology (now Psychological and Brain Sciences) and that of Speech and Hearing Sciences, alon...

Listeners are able to resolve subtle spectral-temporal details of speech waveforms when attempting to recognize words spoken in the listeners' native language. This may provide support for the existence of some processing mechanisms that are specific to the sounds of speech. A more parsimonious interpretation is that all highly familiar spectral-te...

SPATS is evaluated as a testing and training system for hearing‐aid (HA) users and cochlear‐implant (CI) users. Criterion measures include the HINT, CNC tests, W22 tests, and Coxs CDT, parts of Gatehouses SSQ and a special SPATS inventory. SPATS measures include the identification of syllable constituents (onsets, nuclei, and codas) and measures of...

While informational masking (IM) has been investigated for almost a half century, only recently have there been efforts to develop a principled definition of this class of interference effects among sensory stimuli. This paper briefly reviews the history of IM and discusses some recent efforts toward a definition. Some experiments with tonal patter...

In the present investigation, sensory‐perceptual abilities of one thousand young adults with normal hearing are being evaluated with a range of auditory, visual, and cognitive measures. Four auditory measures were derived from factor‐analytic analyses of previous studies with 18–20 speech and non‐speech variables [G. R. Kidd et al., J. Acoust. Soc....

Nearly a half century ago, Ira Hirsh published the first of many articles establishing the difference between (A) auditory temporal acuity (the ability to distinguish two sounds by their temporal properties) and (B) the limits of the perception of the temporal order of sounds. The thresholds for both A and B are described in terms of stimulus onset...

Three experiments tested listeners' ability to identify 70 diverse environmental sounds using limited spectral information. Experiment 1 employed low- and high-pass filtered sounds with filter cutoffs ranging from 300 to 8000 Hz. Listeners were quite good (>50% correct) at identifying the sounds even when severely filtered; for the high-pass filter...

The relationships between acoustic properties and listeners' judgments of sound quality were investigated using a semantic differential technique. A diverse collection of 145 common sounds was presented to 32 listeners who rated the sounds on 20 seven-point rating scales. The sounds were of a variety of common objects and events (e.g., dishwasher,...

Standardized sensory, perceptual, linguistic, intellectual, and cognitive tests were administered to 470 children, approximately 96% of the students entering the first grade in the four elementary schools of Benton County, Indiana, over a 3-year period (1995--1997). The results of 36 tests and subtests administered to entering first graders were we...

In past reports we have described a technique by which listeners may be trained to focus their auditory attention on a particular spectral‐temporal region of a complex acoustic stimulus, using the psychophysical method of adjustment. Previous work will be reviewed, and the results of a new experiment will be described, in which listeners were train...

Over four decades ago, Ira Hirsh was one of the first to recognize the need for auditory research to expand beyond the study of single tones, noise burst, and clicks. He wrote, ``We propose to examine auditory perception at a more complex level. The discrimination among and identification of single sounds, which we shall refer to as acoustic events...

Among listeners with normal pure-tone sensitivity there is considerable variation in spectral and temporal discrimination abilities, as measured with nonspeech sounds. However, contrary to theories that associate deficits in auditory processing with degraded speech perception, individual differences in a battery of measures of spectral-temporal acu...

This study investigated two sources of variance in the ability to discriminate auditory profiles: individual differences and extended training. The goals of the study were (1) to determine the range and origins of individual differences in profile analysis and (2) to determine whether those who initially had poor sensitivity to changes in spectral...

Profile-analysis experiments have typically employed static profiles with constant frequency components spaced at equal intervals along a logarithmic frequency axis. Most periodic, naturally occurring stimuli, however, have components that are harmonically related and vary dynamically in time. One goal of these studies was to determine whether ampl...

While a large portion of the variance among listeners in speech recognition is associated with the audibility of components of the speech waveform, it is not possible to predict individual differences in the accuracy of speech processing strictly from the audiogram. This has suggested that some of the variance may be associated with individual diff...

Rate thresholds for syllable–sequences [the Indiana Test of Auditory Memory and Processing Rate—ITAMPR, Watson and Eddins, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 105, 1236 (1999)] and backward‐masking thresholds, were obtained from 220 children. These measures were only weakly associated with reading achievement and with speech recognition. Other tests, however, acco...

Using positron emission tomography (PET), we have been studying the relationship between psychophysical performance and cortical activation during auditory discrimination tasks. In one experiment, we studied normal hearing listeners who had markedly different perceptual performance on a battery of auditory discrimination tasks. Changes in regional...

Five experienced hearing-aid users with sensorineural hearing loss were given 14 h of intensive training identifying consonants in quiet and noise. Their performance was compared to that of five similar hearing-aid users with no special training. All listeners had moderate to severe hearing losses and had worn hearing aids for at least 1 year. All...

An extended version of the Test of Basic Auditory Capabilities (TBAC) [Watson et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Suppl. 1 71, S73 (1982)] includes 19 subtests that evaluate listeners? abilities to discriminate and identify auditory stimuli. Stimuli include single tones, tonal sequences, SAM and rippled noise, temporal gaps, nonwords, words, sentences, and...

Listeners? abilities to identify environmental sounds under high?pass and low?pass filtering was determined using a constant?stimulus method. The goal was to determine the degree to which listeners rely on information in various frequency regions when attempting to identify naturally occurring sounds. In experiment 1, 70 environmental sounds were l...

As part of an ongoing study of environmental sounds, identification thresholds were obtained for a collection of 100 naturally occurring familiar sounds embedded in noise. Threshold event‐to‐noise ratios covered a range of over 23 dB. Differences in total energy or in the spectral–temporal distribution of energy accounted for, at best, only 45% of...

A backward masking test was administered to 247 fourth‐grade children participating in the Benton‐IU Project, an epidemiological, longitudinal study of the factors that lead to success or failure in grade school. It has been hypothesized that children with language disorders, including reading disabilities, demonstrate high levels of backward maski...

The relations between hearing ability and several sensory, perceptual, and cognitive abilities were determined for all children entering first grade in the Benton County, Indiana school system for three consecutive years. This research was part of a multi?disciplinary, epidemiological, longitudinal study of the factors that influence the developmen...

The Indiana Test of Auditory Memory and Processing Rate (ITAMPR) is designed to measure children?s abilities to identify sequences of speech elements. Subtests determine whether identification performance is primarily limited by the rate at which the stimuli are presented or by the number of stimuli in a sequence. Stimuli consist of 80?ms syllables...

Evidence in support of several generalizations about individual differences in speech recognition will be reviewed. First, the range of these abilities among normal?hearing adults appears to be reliable and large enough to be of some functional significance. Second, auditory spectral and temporal acuity, as measured with nonspeech sounds, fail to a...

In separate experiments, detection and identification thresholds were obtained for a set of 25 common environmental sounds (e.g., dog barking, car starting). In the detection task, threshold values of the event‐to‐noise ratio (Ev/N) were established using an adaptive tracking procedure. The identification experiment was part of a larger individual...

Recently the term ‘‘plasticity’’ has been used in discussions of certain changes in human listeners’ abilities to detect, discriminate, and identify simple and complex sounds. In some cases this appears to be merely an effort to use language appropriate to the Zeitgeist. To conclude that any specific neuroanatomical or neurophysiological change is...

Ten normal‐hearing college students performed two‐interval, two‐alternative, forced choice discrimination tasks designed to determine the optimal range of interstimulus (ISI) intervals for auditory discrimination of intensity, duration, and frequency. Stimuli were randomized (roved) along frequency, intensity, and duration dimensions to reduce mono...

User analysis is a crucial aspect of user-centered systems design, yet Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has yet to formulate reliable and valid characterizations of users beyond gross distinctions based on task and experience. Individual differences research from mainstream psychology has identified a stable set of characteristics that would appear...

Listeners’ abilities to discriminate profile stimuli were measured using 11‐component profiles with component frequencies from 200 to 2200 Hz. The effects of logarithmic versus harmonic spacing of the components and static versus dynamic temporal contours were examined, with and without roving level (20‐dB range). Dynamic profiles had a linear freq...

The effect of a change in tempo on the ability to detect frequency changes in sequences of tones was examined after extensive training with four patterns. In a previous study, uniform tone‐duration increases of up to 300% were found to have little effect on frequency discrimination thresholds under high‐uncertainty testing [G. R. Kidd and C. S. Wat...

Two experiments were run to determine whether individual differences in auditory speech-recognition abilities are significantly correlated with those for speech reading (lipreading), employing a total sample of 90 normal-hearing college students. Tests include single words and sentences, recorded on a videodisc by a male speaker [Bernstein and Eber...

Most studies of auditory recognition and identification have employed either speech stimuli or nonspeech soundsgenerated in the laboratory (e.g., tones of various frequencies, tonal patterns, click trains). The present study employed 25 naturally occurring complex sounds (obtained from a commercial sound‐effects library), such as those produced by...

Most profile experiments have employed static profiles with logarithmic spacing. Many naturally occurring sounds have harmonic spacing and vary dynamically in time. Watson and Drennan [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 97, 3272(A) (1995)] examined profile discrimination using both static and frequency?glide profiles with harmonic and logarithmic component spacin...

In this review of auditory psychophysics and perception, we cite some important books, research monographs, and research summaries from the past decade. Within auditory psychophysics, we have singled out some topics of current importance: Cross-Spectral Processing, Timbre and Pitch, and Methodological Developments. Complex sounds and complex listen...

The ability to detect frequency changes in transposed sequences of tones was examined in a series of seven experiments. Listeners were asked to judge which of two transposed (i.e., frequency-shifted) comparison patterns preserved the sequence of relative frequencies presented in a preceding standard pattern. The task was performed with five-tone an...

Psychoacoustic studies cast some doubt on the hypothesis that deficits in auditory temporal processing cause speech and language disorders. First, the temporal acuity of the auditory system so greatly exceeds that required by tasks considered to support this hypothesis [e.g., Tallal and Piercy, Nature241, 468–469 (1973)] that disordered subjects wo...

Sounds were created by passing an increasing‐frequency 300‐ms sawtooth (120–170 Hz) through each of the 15 complex filters. The filters were created by varying two parameters of a pair of overlapping second‐order filters (CF: 500 and 1500 Hz). The parameters varied were the width of the upper filter (Q: 1, 3, 8) and the relative amplitudes of the t...

??Profile?? stimuli consisting of multiple simultaneous fixed?frequency sinusoidal components are more representative of naturally occurring sounds than the spectrally simpler waveforms more often used in psychoacoustic experiments. However, most naturally occurring sounds are characterized by dynamic rather than static spectra, and by harmonically...

During the final year of the award we devoted considerable time to an evaluation of the Institute's activities during its first years of operation. A great deal has been accomplished, as described in this report and the annual reports that preceded it. It was recognized in our final evaluation of the Institutes accomplishments, however, that the ce...

Training to attend selectively to certain spectral?temporal components of four tonal patterns has been found to have only slight effects on discrimination performance [Port et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 93, 2315(A) (1993)]. In a new version of this experiment, a novel pattern (ten 50?ms tones, 300 3 kHz in frequency) was presented on each trial. One...

The effects of decision criterion on response latencies of binary decisions were examined. The stimuli comprised two, partly overlapping, "normal" distributions of either two-digit numbers or tonal frequencies. Individual stimuli were randomly sampled from the distributions, and subjects had to decide from which distribution the stimulus was sample...

Thresholds for formant-frequency discrimination were obtained for ten synthetic English vowels patterned after a female talker. To estimate the resolution of the auditory system for these stimuli, thresholds were measured using well-trained subjects under minimal-stimulus-uncertainty procedures. Thresholds were estimated for both increments and dec...

It has been assumed that subjects trained to detect increments in the frequency of all components of complex tonal patterns (broad focus) would be less accurate in detecting changes in a single target tone than subjects who have been trained to detect changes in only that component [e.g., Watson et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 60, 1176–1186 (1976)]. In...

A method of adjustment was used to establish the importance of each of several structural properties of the context tones, in nine‐tone sequences, in determining the perceptual isolability of target components. Successful ‘‘perceptual isolation’’ of a target tone was assumed to be achieved when frequency matches were as accurate as those achieved f...

A difficulty in tonal‐pattern research is that several thousand trials are typically required to approach asymptotic discrimination performance under minimal‐uncertainty testing conditions. One solution to this problem is to use the method of adjustment to determine thresholds, rather than a forced‐choice psychophysical method. In this study the ex...

A principle of auditory perception that governs the detectability of changes in components in unfamiliar sequences of tones is demonstrated in four experiments. The proportion-of-the-total-duration (PTD) rule can be stated as follows: Each individual component of an unfamiliar sequence of tones is resolved with an accuracy that is a function of its...

In previous work, it was demonstrated that frequency resolving power for each individual component of an unfamiliar sequence of tones increases with the component?s proportion of the total sequence duration [G. R. Kidd and C. S. Watson, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. (to be published)]. This work has now been extended to the case of durationdiscrimination. In...

In a modification of the previous profile discrimination experiments [summarized in D. M. Green, Profile Analysis (Oxford U.P., New York, 1988)], intensity increments were introduced at one of ten temporal positions during the overall duration of 11‐tone profiles. When both the frequency and the temporal position of intensity increments are varied...

Two experiments were run to determine whether the individual differences in auditory speech processing are predictable from those in speechreading, using a total of 90 normal?hearing subjects. Tests included single words and sentences. The speech was recorded on a video disk by a male actor (Bernstein and Eberhardt, 1986, Johns Hopkins Lipreading C...

The present series of experiments examined the ability of normal-hearing listeners to make use of cues from multiple, independent stimulus dimensions when classifying multidimensional complex sounds. Ten listeners classified complex sound pulses that differed along three independent dimensions. The stimuli were 100 ms in duration and were synthesiz...

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Recent studies of complex auditory pattern discrimination have supported the hypothesis that, with novel patterns, the ability to resolve pattern details on a given dimension is affected by the amount of variation on that dimension [Watson et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 88, 2631?2638 (1990)]. When the amount of variation on a dimension is very low, pa...

A Second conference was held during this funding period, on March 20- 22, 1991, again on the subject of 'Human Error.' During this funding period, one Institute-supported psychophysical testing station was used in cross-modality sensory and cognitive research by a visiting scientist, Ted Bell from UCLA. Also during this funding period, the Universi...

During the third year of its URI/AFOSR support, two new psychophysical testing stations were used in cross-modality sensory and cognitive research and a third was constructed for auditory-visual projects. Initial experiments underway with these systems include a visual detection task with auditory cuing, a tactile-visual identification experiment,...

Recent studies of the perception of complex nonspeech sounds have shown that individual parts of spectral-temporal waveforms become more salient through experience or selective training. One consequence of this is that the same sound can be perceived quite differently, depending on prior experience and also on the listener's expectations. The time...

In three experiments, listeners' abilities to detect changes in randomly generated tonal sequences were determined for sequences or "patterns" ranging in total duration from 62.5 ms to 2 s. Experiment 1 utilized an adaptive-tracking procedure, with n, the number of pattern components, as the dependent variable, and included a variety of spectral an...

In three experiments, listeners’ abilities to detect changes in randomly generated tonal sequences were determined for sequences or ‘‘patterns’’ ranging in total duration from 62.5 62.5 ms to 2 s. Experiment 1 utilized an adaptive‐tracking procedure, with n, the number of pattern components, as the dependent variable, and included a variety of spec...

In general, the chapters in this book do two things. They provide many examples of why tuning and/or simple temporal integration are not sufficient mechanisms to account for the perception of complex sounds. They also review a variety of recent experimental findings that should be considered when models or theories of perceptual organization are pr...

Two general questions have been addressed with experiments using word‐length tonal sequences, or “patterns”: to what degree can the discriminability of complex auditory patterns be predicted from listeners' performance with simpler stimuli, especially single tones presented in isolation? and, (2) How do listeners' abilities to extract inf...

Under high levels of stimulus uncertainty, pattern discrimination performance is often degraded so severely that it would be reasonable to question whether the same processing mechanisms used under minimal?uncertainty conditions are still available to the listeners. It has previously been reported that the degrading effects of high stimulus uncerta...

Justifies the immediate and vigorous development of computer-based speech training (CBST). A taxonomy distinguishes among 48 possible types of CBST systems in terms of (1) physical source of feedback (FBK), (2) standards of evaluation against which new productions are judged, and (3) amount and type of detail extracted from the productions used to...

Experimental comparisons are reported between computer-based and human judgments of speech quality for the same sets of utterances. Speech stimuli were recorded from two normal talkers, who intentionally varied the quality of their speech, and from a hearing-impaired child who was receiving speech therapy on the Indiana Speech Training Aid (ISTRA)....

During the second year of its URI/AFOSR support, two new psychophysical testing stations have been completed for use in cross-modality sensory and cognitive research. Initial experiments underway with these systems include a visual detection task with auditory cuing and a tactile-visual identification experiment. The Institute, by these means, has...

Experimental comparisons are reported between computer-based and human judgments of speech quality for the same sets of utterances. Speech stimuli were recorded from two normal talkers, who intentionally varied the quality of their speech, and from a hearing-impaired child who was receiving speech therapy on the Indiana Speech Training Aid (ISTRA)....

Pastore [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 84, 2262-2266 (1988)] has written a lengthy response to Kewley-Port, Watson, and Foyle [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 83, 1133-1145 (1988)]. In this reply to Pastore's letter, several of his arguments are addressed, and new data are reported which support the conclusion of the original article. That conclusion is, basically, that...