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When utterances contain conflicting emotion cues, 6-year-olds judge emotion from content, even when instructed to judge emotion from paralanguage (Morton & Trehub, 2001). Two experiments examined the nature of this bias. In Experiment 1, priming paralanguage reversed 6-year-olds' normal bias to content. In Experiment 2, 6-year-olds were instructed to listen to paralanguage under various conditions. Children were more likely to follow instructions delivered with feedback than instructions delivered alone. Children who described conflicts between content and paralanguage were more likely to follow instructions than children who did not describe these conflicts. Results suggest that 6-year-olds can judge emotion from paralanguage in the presence of competing content but often remain focused on content because of the way they represent the instructions.

Children's understanding of emotion in speech was explored in three experiments. In Experiment 1, 4- to 10-year-old children and adults (N = 165) judged the happiness or sadness of the speaker from cues conveyed by propositional content and affective paralanguage. When the cues conflicted (i.e., a happy situation was described with sad paralanguage), children relied primarily on content, in contrast to adults, who relied on paralanguage. There were gradual developmental changes from 4-year-olds' almost exclusive focus on content to adults' exclusive focus on paralanguage. Children of all ages exhibited greater response latencies to utterances with conflicting cues than to those with nonconflicting cues, indicating that they processed both sources of emotional information. Children accurately labeled the affective paralanguage when the propositional cues to emotion were obscured by a foreign language (Experiment 2, N = 20) or by low-pass filtering (Experiment 3, N = 60). The findings are consistent with children's limited understanding of the communicative functions of affective paralanguage.

Infants 8-11 months of age were exposed to repetitions of a 6-tone sequence or melody, then tested for their discrimination of transpositions of that sequence as well as other melodic transformations previously used by Massaro, Kallman, and Kelly with adults. In experiment 1, infants showed evidence of discriminating all transformations from the original melody. In Experiment 2, the task was made more difficult, and infants failed to discriminate transpositions of the original melody as well as transformations that preserved the melodic contour and approximate frequency range of the original melody. By contrast, infants showed evidence of discriminating transformations that violated the contour of the original melody or that included changes in the octaves from which component tones were drawn. This global processing strategy parallels that used by adults with atonal or unfamiliar tonal melodies.

The present study investigated the effect of the relation between conditions at encoding and retrieval on infants' performance on a paired-comparison recognition test. 64 9-month-old infants were given 40 sec to visually or visually and haptically explore a 3-dimensional object. Subsequently, during a 10-sec recognition trial infants were presented with the familiar object and a novel object and their response to each was monitored. Half of the infants from each familiarization condition were permitted to inspect the test-trial stimuli visually, while the other half inspected the stimuli visually and haptically. Thus, in the present study the infant's mode of exploration was either the same during encoding and retrieval or different. Infants demonstrated recognition of the familiar object (via novelty preference) only when mode of exploration was constant across the encoding and retrieval trials. The relation between the conditions at encoding and retrieval is thus an important determinant of the infants' performance on a paired-comparison recognition test.

Infants' processing of temporal parameters of auditory patterns was investigated by assessing the ability of 5-month-old infants to discriminate between multitone patterns with identical component tones but contrasting temporal arrangements of these tones. Following habituation of the cardiac response to a 6-tone stimulus with 2,4 grouping infants were presented with the same tonal sequence with 4,2 grouping. Significant dishabituation was evident, indicating discrimination of different temporal groupings of auditory stimuli.

Infants 9-11 months of age were tested for their discrimination of changes in the melodic contour (direction of successive pitch changes) of brief melodies in the context of discernible variations in key (different absolute frequencies, same intervals) or interval size (different absolute frequencies and frequency ratios, same contour). Infants detected contour changes in both variable contexts, suggesting that they categorize sequences of sounds on the basis of global, relational properties such as melodic contour. Implications of such processing strategies for infants' perception of running speech are considered.

In an attempt to explore the relation between the amount of variability in a stimulus and rate of habituation to that stimulus, 4 groups of infants 4 1/2--5 1/2 months of age were presented with repeated speech stimuli which were synthesized exemplars of [baba], natural exemplars of [baba] or [kaba], or novel syllables of each trial. Infants' cardiac responses to the auditory stimuli were recorded, and the number of trials to a proportional criterion of habituation of the heart-rate decelerative response was determined. Infants were found to habituate most rapidly to the synthesized [baba] stimulus which remained constant across trials and least rapidly to the speech syllables which changed from trial to trial.

Deaf children 6-10 years of age, from oral or bimodal educational programs, were tested in 2 tasks. In the first, they were required to describe a designated picture from a set of 4 pictures so that their mother could identify the intended referent from the 4 alternatives. In the second, they studied a single picture and were subsequently required to identify it from a set of 4 related pictures. Despite greater hearing loss, bimodally educated children provided more differentiated messages than did orally educated children. Bimodally educated children also provided better reformulations of messages that were initially inadequate. Although mothers of orally educated children received inferior messages, they were as successful at selecting the correct referent as were mothers of bimodally educated children. Both groups of deaf children performed at near perfect levels on the picture recognition task, suggesting that performance differences were attributable to differential message formulation skill as opposed to differential visual processing of the referential array.