The probe-signal method (Greenberg & Larkin, 1968) was used to determine the percentage of trials in which unpracticed subjects detected (two-interval, forced-choice)a soft, expected sound as compared with an unexpected sound. Pure tones at or near an expected frequency were detected in about 90% of the trials. Tones more than one-half critical band away were detected near chance (50%). Complex sounds (a band of noise or a multitone complex) were detected better if they were inside the same critical band as the expected signal than if they were outside the band. A signal that differed spectrally from the expected sound was not detected even though it had the same low pitch, based on a common fundamental frequency. The results may mean that under some conditions focused attention alters sensitivity in the auditory system.

The article describes two research programs on the syntactic abilities of hearing impaired and normal hearing individuals. The first program was concerned with describing some of the syntactic problems of deaf students in acquiring English structure; the second involved the construction of the Test of Syntactic Abilities and its application to deaf, hard of hearing, and normal hearing students in the United States, Canada, and Australia. This report has four objectives: (1) to summarize and integrate the findings of the two research programs, (2) to relate the findings to the literature on other populations, (3) to discuss strategies used by the research populations in handling English syntax, and (4) to discuss some applications of the findings to language development.

Ten each severely prelingually deaf boys and girls at the ages of nine–10, 11–12, 13–14, 15–16, and 17–18 years were tested for their comprehension and production of the passive voice. The comprehension tasks consisted of moving toys to demonstrate the action of a sentence, or selecting a picture showing the action of the sentence. The production task required subjects to fill the gap in a sentence with the correct set of passive markers. Significant improvement with age took place on all tasks, but even at 17–18 years only slightly more than half the children correctly understood passive sentences and less than half correctly produced such sentences. Deaf children to an advanced age interpret passive sentences in terms of the surface subject-verb-object order of their constituents. Our subjects scored lowest on a test of agent-deleted passive sentences, somewhat higher on reversible passives, and highest on nonreversible passives. By was the only passive marker for most deaf children. A small number of the youngest children interpreted active sentences in terms of object-verb-subject order.

Four groups of deaf subjects between the ages of 10-0 and 18-11 years were tested, employing the Test of Syntactic Ability, and the language subtests of the Stanford Achievement Test, in a study of the influence of early language and communication environment on later syntactic language ability. The groups, 18 subjects in each, were dichotomized by whether the parents were hearing or deaf and further subgrouped by the language ability of the parents if the parents were deaf, and by the amount and intensity of oral preschool training provided by the parents if the parents were hearing. The groups were labeled by the type of language used with them in infancy and early childhood: manual English, average manual, intensive oral, and average oral. Results showed significant superiority of the manual English group over the two oral groups on five of the six major test structures of the Test of Syntactic Ability. On the Stanford Achievement Test, the manual English group performed significantly better than the other three groups on all four subtests. The two manual groups performed significantly better than the two oral groups on every test measure employed.

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