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The purpose of this study was to determine how low-income socioeconomic status (SES) African American preschool students perform in receptive vocabulary with respect to sex differences and to examine how the research sample as a whole compared with the normative mean of the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, Fourth Edition (PPVT-4; Dunn & Dunn, 2007). Method: Thirty preschoolers, 15 boys (M = 4.53 years, SD = .28 years) and 15 girls (M = 4.52 years, SD = .27 years), were randomly selected from public schools in three Louisiana parishes and were administered the PPVT-4. Results: Statistical analyses indicated that the boys performed significantly higher than the girls in receptive T

The purpose was to examine the effect of language familiarity on magnitude-estimation scaling of loudness by young adults. Two groups of subjects participated in this study. Group 1 of 20 subjects (M age = 23.95 yr.) were familiar with English and not familiar with Hindi. Group 2 of 20 subjects (M age = 24.30 yr.) were familiar with English as well as Hindi. Two separate magnitude-estimation scaling tasks were performed. On the first scaling task, an English sentence was used as the stimulus, and on the second scaling task, a Hindi sentence was used as the stimulus. Statistical analysis showed that there was no significant difference between the two groups in loudness judgments of the English and Hindi sentences. Subjects scaled the loudness of an unfamiliar language in the same manner as they scaled the loudness of a familiar language. The findings suggest that magnitude-estimation scaling is an effective measure of loudness whether the language being listened to is familiar to the listener.

This study examined the differences between acoustic characteristics of lexical and emphatic stress patterns of American English in terms of changes in fundamental frequency (F0), duration, and amplitude of the stress patterns, and identified the most important acoustic characteristics among them. Speech samples were recorded from 13 randomly selected women (M=23.9 yr., SD= 1.7) who spoke American English as their first language. The speech samples were recorded using Computerized Speech Lab (CSL) Model 4300B with a 16-bit processor at a sampling rate of 44.1 kHz. Acoustic analyses of the lexical stress and emphatic stress patterns were performed. Statistical analyses showed a significant effect for the stress patterns and F0, duration, and amplitude; a significant effect for the stress types and F0, duration, and amplitude; and a significant interaction between the patterns and types. Based on the effect size, it can be concluded that duration appeared to be a more important acoustic character than amplitude or F0 in differentiating the lexical and emphatic stress patterns.