Can input in one sensory modality strengthen memory in a different sensory modality? To address this question, we asked participants to encode images presented in various locations (e.g., a depicted dog in the top left corner of the screen) while they heard spatially uninformative sounds. Some of these sounds matched the image (e.g., the word “dog” or a barking sound) while others did not. In a...

This study examined the role of verbal labeling in 4-year-old children's acquisition of action-effect learning. The acquisition of action-effect associations was tested by having children first perform a two-choice key-pressing task in which each key press was followed by an effect (i.e., a particular sound) and then respond to the previously perceived effects under either consistent or inconsi...

Acoustic-based computer interactivity offers great potential [1], particularly with blind and visually impaired users [2]. At Indiana University’s School of Informatics at IUPUI, we have developed an innovative educational approach relying on “audemes,” short, nonverbal sound symbols made up of 2-5 individual sounds lasting 3-7 seconds like expanded “earcons”[3] to encode and prompt memory. To ...

The aims of this study were (1) to document the recognition performance of environmental sounds (ESs) in Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants (CIs) and to analyze the possible associated factors with the ESs recognition; (2) to examine the relationship between perception of ESs and receptive vocabulary level; and (3) to explore the acoustic factors relevant to perceptual outcomes o...

In three experiments, subjects studied photographs presented alone or followed by a descriptive sentence. The sentence provided additional information not available in the picture. Subsequent yes-no recognition tests for the pictures demonstrated better memory for those pictures that had been followed by descriptive sentences. Experiment 1 showed that described pictures were remembered better r...

I N T R O D U C T I O N Recent experiments performed by two groups of researchers at CMU have gathered data on subjects using speech recognizers in office-like environments (Rudnicky, et al., 1989, Stern & Acero, 1989). These experiments are presented by the authors in these proceedings. Among other things, they show that non-verbal events (non-stationary noises) do create serious problems for ...

Three experiments explored the verbal overshadowing effect, that is, the phenomenon that describing a previously seen face impairs recognition of this face. There were three main results: First, a verbal overshadowing effect was obtained both when subjects were provided with and when they generated a description of an earlier seen face. Second, instructing subjects at the time of test to be awa...

Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. Liboschik und Kathrin Scheps für ihre Unterstützung und Ermutigung, die mir die Anferti-gung dieser Arbeit sehr erleichtert hat.