A forward-gating procedure, employing highly familiar monosyllabic words, was used in testing 5-7-year-old children, 15-17-year-old teenagers, and 70-85-year-old adults. Teenagers identified the words at shorter gate durations than either the children or older adults, whose identification performances were nearly identical. Teenagers gave meaningful guesses at shorter durations than children, who, in turn, gave meaningful guesses at shorter durations than adults. The oldest listeners provided the largest number of phonetic guesses, whereas teenagers gave almost none. Individual differences in auditory pure-tone sensitivity did not account for the results. It is hypothesized that both word frequency effects and temporal processing differences were responsible for the findings. 150In a study of speech perception of monosyllabic nouns, Elliott et al. (1979) found that 5-and 6-year-old children required higher intensity levels to identify words presented in quiet than did older children or adults, even though the stimuli were within the receptive vocabularies of 3-year-olds. Since an adaptive threshold-tracking procedure was used, stimuli were always presented at levels close to threshold. Elliott et al. suggested that listeners with higher levels of language skill might be more adept at identifying words from partial or limited acoustic information than subjects with less mature language development.The gating paradigm developed by Grosjean (1980) as a means of examining spoken-word recognition appears to offer a good means of further examining developmental changes in word recognition. In the gating paradigm, portions of words are presented, beginning at either the word onset (Cotton & Grosjean, 1984;Grosjean, 1980) or the word ending (Salasoo & Pisoni, 1985). For example, if 50-msec gates are used and forward gating is employed, one stimulus contains the initial 50 msec of a word, another contains the initial 100 msec, and so on. The listener's task is to identify the word, and this may require considerable guessing when the stimulus duration is brief. Grosjean (1980) used the gating paradigm to replicate influences of word frequency, word length, and sentence context on speech perception that were similar to those that had been reported by others.The gating paradigm provides one means of presenting limited acoustic information about a stimulus, since the first gates contain only the initial, incomplete portion of the word. Presenting speech stimuli at low-intensity

Sudden sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) is a well-recognized phenomenon that is attributed to a variety of etiologies. Sudden SNHL after cardiopulmonary bypass surgery has been well reported and is thought to be due to microemboli. However, a review of the English literature revealed only 15 cases of SNHL after general anesthesia for nonotologic surgery. Several etiologies for this loss have been suggested, but no proven pathogenesis is yet available. This report adds to the literature three additional cases of sudden SNHL after general anesthesia for nonotologic surgery. The literature is reviewed and proposed mechanisms of injury are discussed.

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