Much of speech perception research has focused on brief spectro-temporal properties in the signal, but some studies have shown that adults can recover linguistic form when those properties are absent. In this experiment, seven-year-old English-speaking children demonstrated adult-like abilities to understand speech when only sine waves replicating the three lowest resonances of the vocal tract were presented, but failed to demonstrate comparable abilities when noise bands amplitude-modulated with envelopes derived from the same signals were presented. In contrast, adults who were not native English speakers, but were competent second language learners, were worse at understanding both kinds of stimuli than native English-speaking adults. Results showed that children learn to extract linguistic form from signals that preserve some spectral structure, even if degraded, before they learn to do so for signals that preserve only amplitude structure. We hypothesize that children's early sensitivity to global spectral structure reflects the role that it may play in language learning.

The influence of reinforcer magnitude and reinforcer delay on smoking abstinence was studied using an analog model of contingency management. Participants (N = 103, 74% men) visited our laboratory 3 times daily for 5 days and received money for providing a breath sample that indicated smoking abstinence (carbon monoxide level ≤6 parts per million). Using a factorial design, we assigned participants randomly to 1 of 4 groups that could earn a total of either $207.50 (high-magnitude condition) or $70.00 (low-magnitude condition), and received earnings either at each visit (no-delay condition) or in a single lump sum 1 week following the study (delay condition). High-magnitude reinforcement, regardless of delay, was associated with higher rates of abstinence than was low-magnitude reinforcement. High magnitude of reinforcement provided immediately but in incremental amounts was associated with longer intervals to relapse during treatment in comparison with high-magnitude reinforcement provided in a single lump sum after a delay. Low rates of responding in the low-magnitude conditions made interpretation of the impact of delay in those conditions difficult. These findings further demonstrate that high magnitude of reinforcement results in better outcomes than does low magnitude of reinforcement, and that a delay to reinforcement can be detrimental-even when a high magnitude of reinforcement is provided.

Challenges to EBP utilization and fidelity should be monitored as EBPs contribute to the delivery of high-quality care. Collaborations between universities and rural agencies may support an agency's abilities to adopt EBPs, train staff, and systematically assess impact.

Cotinine could be more informative for tailoring behavioral treatments compared to self-report measures.

Listeners comprehend sentences when only amplitude envelope information for a few bandlimited channels is available, but there is variability in their abilities to do so. This experiment asked whether the variability in listeners’ abilities to comprehend these signals is best explained by variability in magnitude of linguistic context effects, in auditory processing, or in sensitivity to structural organization at a global level. Stimuli were 30 four-word syntactically appropriate, semantically anomalous sentences, processed to preserve envelope information in 4 or 8 channels. Listeners were two groups of native English speakers (adults and 7-year-old children) and one group of native Mandarin speakers (adults) who were proficient enough in English to be graduate students at an American university. The sentences provided linguistic context that should affect comprehension equally for all these listeners, so that possible outcomes were (1) All three groups would perform similarly if abilities to use linguistic context best explained previously reported variability; (2) both adult groups would perform similarly and better than children if age-related differences in auditory processing best explained variability; and (3) English-speaking children and Mandarin-speaking adults would perform similarly and poorer than English-speaking adults if sensitivity to global structure best explained variability. Results matched possible outcome ♯3. [Work supported by NIDCD Grant No. DC-00633.]