This paper investigates to what extent users of bilateral and bimodal fittings should expect to benefit from all three different binaural advantages found to be present in normal-hearing listeners. Head-shadow and binaural squelch are advantages occurring under spatially separated speech and noise, while summation emerges when speech and noise coincide in space. For 14 bilateral or bimodal listeners, speech reception thresholds in the presence of four-talker babble were measured in sound-field under various speech and noise configurations. Statistical analysis revealed significant advantages of head-shadow and summation for both bilateral and bimodal listeners. Squelch was significant only for bimodal listeners.

Purpose This study investigates adult word learning to determine how neighborhood density and practice across phonologically-related training sets influence on-line learning from input during training versus off-line memory evolution during no-training gaps. Method Sixty-one adults were randomly assigned to learn low or high density nonwords. Within each density condition, participants were trained on one set of words and then were trained on a second set of words, consisting of phonological neighbors of the first set. Learning was measured in a picture-naming test. Data were analyzed using multilevel modeling and spline regression. Results Steep learning during input was observed, with new words from dense neighborhoods and new words that were neighbors of recently learned words (i.e., second set words) being learned better than other words. In terms of memory evolution, large and significant forgetting was observed during 1-week gaps in training. Effects of density and practice during memory evolution were opposite of those during input. Specifically, forgetting was greater for high density and second set words than for low density and first set words. Conclusion High phonological similarity, regardless of source (i.e., known words or recent training), appears to facilitate on-line learning from input but seems to impede off-line memory evolution.

Recent research suggests that visually-presented words are initially morphologically segmented whenever the letter-string can be exhaustively assigned to existing morphological representations, but not when an exhaustive parse is unavailable; e.g., priming is observed for both hunter→HUNT and brother →BROTH, but not for brothel→BROTH. Few studies have investigated whether this pattern extends to novel complex words, and the results to date (all from novel suffixed words) are mixed. In the current study, we examine whether novel compounds (drugrack→RACK) yield morphological priming which is dissociable from that in novel pseudoembedded words (slegrack→RACK). Using masked priming, we find significant and comparable priming in reaction times for word-final elements of both novel compounds and novel pseudoembedded words. Using overt priming, however, we find greater priming effects (in both reaction times and N400 amplitudes) for novel compounds compared to novel pseudoembedded words. These results are consistent with models assuming across-the-board activation of putative constituents, while also suggesting that morpheme activation may persevere despite the lack of an exhaustive morpheme-based parse when an exhaustive monomorphemic analysis is also unavailable. These findings highlight the critical role of the lexical status of the pseudoembedded prime in dissociating morphological and orthographic priming.

PACS number(s): 43.71.Ky [ADP] The authors incorrectly reported that the order of the testing conditions was randomized. Instead, testing was grouped by listening condition to facilitate the procedure. Testing for binaural conditions preceded testing for monaural conditions. Thus, any potential order effects involving learning processes are not expected to have inflated the binaural advantages reported for either group. Table II reporting SRTs for bilateral and bimodal listeners also contained errors as published. The corrected table follows.The corrected average head-shadow and squelch effects for bilateral listeners are HS ¼ 9.2 dB and SQ ¼ À0.9 dB. The corrected binaural squelch effect for bimodal listeners is SQ ¼ 4.1 dB. The significance of the contribution of each binaural effect to each group and the conclusions drawn from the statistical analyses were not affected.