The effect of punishment and reinforcement procedures on a stutterer's factor II avoidance response

The purpose of this clinical experiment was to investigate the manipulability of a Factor II avoidance response (arm movement). The substantive hypothesis under test was that its suppression would be enhanced by repeated punishment sessions. During the first of nine therapy sessions response-contingent negative stimulation was not delivered. In the next five, after a base-rate period, “wrong” was made consequent upon the target response. In each of these sessions the suppression of arm movement was apparent. However, the magnitude of the suppression decreased from session to session. Evidently, the continued use of punishment did not enhance suppression. Because of this finding procedural changes were introduced in the next three therapy sessions. Verbal praise was added as a consequence of increasingly stringent omission criteria and three consecutive units of praise led to time-out from the reportedly fatiguing task of continuous speech. A marked reduction and then complete extinction resulted. Moreover, learning was evidenced since the frequency of arm movement lessened in the base-rate period of each session.     

Stuttering adaptation under distributed and massed conditions

An identical-subject-repeated-measures design, involving two counterbalanced conditions, was employed to investigate adaptation when the presentation of a 100-word list is distributed and when it is massed. In Condition I, the entire list was read aloud during each of five successive trials. Since a specific word reoccurred only after all of the others were displayed, the presentation may be said to be distributed. In contrast, the Condition II presentation was massed. Only after a word was read five times was the next one presented. The results indicate that significant adaptation occurred in both conditions. However, adaptation plateaued in the distributed condition. This was not the case when massing was employed. The among-condition analyses revealed that significantly more adaptation occurred in the massed than in the distributed condition.     

Hemispheric interference: A dual-task investigation of youngsters who stutter

Hemispheric interference was studied in this investigation by requiring 24 right-handed grade-school children who stutter to tap a button, as rapidly as possible, in five randomized conditions. Hand order was counterbalanced in the single-task silent control condition and in the four increasingly demanding dual-task conditions. In three of the experimental conditions tapping and speech occured concurrently. In the fourth dual-task condition the subjects were to vocalize the sound of a siren (in an irregularly patterned way) as they tapped the button. Analysis of the tapping rates in this two-by-five factorial study revealed statistically significant differences among hands and conditions. The tapping rate was faster with the right than with the left hand and the rate decreased as the demands of the dual-task conditions increased. Interaction was not evidenced; the interference pattern was similar in both hands across the conditions. Since interference was significantly present in both the speech and vocalic conditions, the data are not consistent with a laterality model. This finding and the increase in interference with increased attentional demand, however, are consistent with a capacity framework.     

The effect of grammatical complexity upon disfluency behavior of nonstuttering preschool children

The effect of grammatical complexity on the disfluency behavior of nonstuttering 3- and 4-yr-old children was examined. Thirty normal children repeated after the examiner 30 sentences which represented six different grammatical constructions. These grammatical constructions represented a range of grammatical complexity.The total number of disfluencies that occurred in each sentence type was compared. The occurrence of specific disfluency categories in each sentence type was also examined. Subjects produced significantly more disfluencies on passive sentences than on any other sentence type. The passive elicited significantly more interjections, word repetitions, and revisions than the other sentence types.The effect of sentence type on imitation performance was also examined. The auxiliary Have and negative sentence types elicited significantly more imitation errors than other sentence types. Initiation and fluency performance for individual subjects were also examined.The results of the present investigation suggest that when grammatical complexity is controlled, the relationship between disfluencies and grammatical complexity is complicated. When grammatical constructions were relatively difficult for children, complexity affected the occurrence of disfluencies. However, factors other than grammatical complexity affect the occurrence of disfluencies in pre-school children.     

The differential effect of three auditory stimuli on the frequency of stuttering behaviors

In view of the frequent clinical use of external auditory stimuli in fluency building programs, the purpose of the present experiment was to compare the effects of rhythmic pacing, delayed auditory feedback, and high intensity masking noise on the frequency of stuttering by dysfluency type. Twelve normal hearing young adult stutterers completed an oral reading (approximately 250 syllables) and conversational speech task (3 min) while listening to the three auditory stimuli and during a control condition presented in random order. The results demonstrated that during oral reading all three auditory stimuli were associated with significant reductions in stuttering frequency. However, during conversational speech, only the metronome produced a significant reduction in total stuttering frequency. Individual dysfluency types were not differentially affected by the three auditory stimuli.     

Sex-role self-concept and attitudes related to occupational daydreams and future fantasies of college women

This study explored the relationship of sex-role self-concept and general attitudes toward women's roles to patterns of career preferences and to career salience among 50 undergraduate women. Sex-role self-concept was measured by the Bem Sex-Role Inventory, and attitudes by the Attitudes Toward Women Scale. Patterns in career preferences were determined by studying the degree of gender dominance in past occupational daydreams as well as in present college major and intended future occupation. Career salience was measured using a content analysis of written future fantasies. Sex-role self-concept was related to past occupational preferences, with masculine-typed women showing a pattern of nontraditional daydreams compared to those of feminine-typed women. Attitude variables were related to present career choices, with liberal women in more male-dominant fields than conservative women. Both self-concept and attitude variables were related to career salience, measured by the proportion of fantasies about the future devoted to work themes. Masculine women showed evidence of more career salience than androgynous or undifferentiated women, and liberal women more than conservative women.     

Tokens for stuttering

Four young stutterers were observed during 10 weekly sessions. Each session was divided into pretreatment, treatment, and posttreatment segments. Redeemable tokens were administered contingent upon stuttering behaviors in the treatment segment of the Experimental condition. In a Parallel Control condition, no tokens were administered during the entire session. The differences between the pretreatment and treatment segments were compared for the two conditions. Three subjects had dramatically fewer stuttering behaviors when tokens were being administered, while the fourth had more stuttering under the same condition. The subject whose stuttering increased had a history of therapy in which voluntary, “faked” stuttering had been called for, and the behaviors that increased were judged to be of this type. The decreases were interpreted as suggesting that the contingent tokens acted to countercondition the aversiveness of the stuttering experience, which reduced the anticipation of stuttering and hence the stuttering itself. The increase was felt to be simple reinforcement. The counterconditioning interpretation was borne out in two clinical applications in which money was presented contingent on stuttering behaviors judged to be aversive to the stutterer, and in which dramatically sudden, but long-lasting, improvement was seen.     

An awareness approach to the covert symptoms of stuttering

Speech-language clinicians working with the confirmed stuttering client are often faced with the clinical management of the covert symptoms of stuttering in addition to the more observable and measurable overt symptoms. The authors report the successful use of awareness techniques to exaggerate the subjective experience of these covert symptoms and encourage the use of these techniques as an adjunct to the counseling and desensitization procedures traditionally employed. A transcribed clinical management session in which several awareness techniques are used to aid the client in an introspective examination of “anticipation of stuttering,” is analyzed in order to reach some specific recommendations for using awareness techniques in the clinical management of the covert symptoms of stuttering.     

Left hemisphere sensitivity to consonant sounds not displayed by the right hemisphere: electrophysiological correlates

Auditory evoked responses (AER) to a series of consonant-vowel syllables were recorded from frontal, temporal, and parietal scalp locations from 14 right-handed college students. Averaged AERs were submitted to principal components analysis and analysis of variance. Six components of the group's AERs were found to reflect various aspects of the stimulus parameters. One component reflected changes over only the left hemisphere to different consonants. A second component changed systematically over both hemispheres but did not discriminate between all consonants.     

Electrophysiological correlates of adult decisions made during a conservation of quantity task

Visual evoked responses were recorded from 10 scalp locations over the left and right hemisphere while adults were involved in a conservation of quantity task. Multivariate analyses involving principal components analysis and ANOVA identified bilateral and left hemisphere lateralized components of the visual evoked responses which discriminated between conservation judgments made by subjects.     

The problem of relapse in stuttering: Some thoughts on what might cause it and how to deal with it

Bloodstein recently wrote that “the most vital part of science is not accurate measurement or the insistence on empiricism. It is an attitude of inquiry into the how and why of things” [Bloodstein, O. Foreword. In: Maintenance of Fluency (E. Boberg ed.). New York: Elsevier, 1981, p. vii]. In the paper below, I present some unsubstantiated and no doubt controversial thoughts on the how and why of relapse in stuttering. The overall thrust of these thoughts is that stutterers have different propensities to stutter because of the inherent variability in their speech production systems. For this reason, for therapy to have long-range success, stutterers must learn to accept and deal with the inherent variability in their speech production mechanisms.     

The early history of the behavior modification of stuttering: From laboratory to clinic

The knowledge of and attitudes toward stuttering of 152 Alabama vocational rehabilitation counselors were studied using the Alabama Rehabilitation Counselors' Attitudes Toward Stuttering (ARCATS) Inventory consisting of 25 true- false statements designed to assess knowledge of stuttering and 15 statements designed to assess attitudes toward stuttering. Counselors were found to perceive stuttering as being significantly vocationally handicapping and amenable to therapy and to perceive stutterers as almost always benefiting from therapy and as being good candidates for vocational rehabilitation. It was concluded that the vocational rehabilitation counselors studied hold attitudes facilitative to the rehabilitation of stutterers.     

How school-aged students define stuttering and stammering

Fifty students from each of the grades 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12 were asked to complete a questionnaire containing the following three questions: 1) What is stuttering? 2) What is stammering? 3) How did you know that? Analysis of their responses indicated students were more familiar with stuttering as opposed to the term stammering. From grade 6 onward, we can expect at least three-fourths of the students to define stuttering as a disruption of speech consisting chiefly of sound or syllable repetitions. Only about one-fourth of students in grade 6 and above defined stammering as a speech disruption. This disruption was characterized chiefly by repetitions, injections, and pauses. Most of the students were unable to specify how they learned the definitions. The few who did identified family and friends as their chief source of knowledge.     

An individualistic approach to the evaluation and remediation of stuttering

A decision model is presented to facilitate the evaluation of stuttering behavior. This model calls for the evaluation to be conducted along a continuum with specified initiation and termination points. Following the evaluation, the information is formulated into an organized remediation procedure leading to fluent productions in the individual. This approach allows evaluation and remediation to be individualized to meet the needs and capabilities of each stutterer while allowing the professional the flexibility to choose remediation materials on the basis of objective information. Two case studies are presented to illustrate the use of the approach.     

The stability of individual differences in behavior across experimental conflict situations

Four experimental conflict situations having theoretical implications have been reported upon with some frequency. The purpose of this study was to compare individual differences on a common measure, response latency, in order to determine the stability of behavior across these four conflict situations using a comparable latency measure. The results of this study do indicate that behavior in experimental conflict studies shows a stability of performance by individual subjects. There are also group mean differences between the four procedures that reflect situational contribution to conflict behavior.     

Some correlates of stuttering severity judgments

Thirteen adult male stutterers recorded the Amplifier Passage on high-quality audiotape. One sentence from each recording was paired with one sentence from each of the remaining 12 recordings. The resulting 78 sentence pairs were presented to eight speech-language pathologists who were asked to judge which stutterer in each pair was more severe and to rate the confidence of each of these judgements. The confidence ratings were analyzed by means of the individual differences model of multidimensional scaling. The results suggested that reading rate and the number of intrasentence pauses were important parameters in determining the severity of stuttering.     

The relevance of DAF-induced speech disruption to the understanding of stuttering

The literature on delayed auditory feedback (DAF) repeatedly makes reference to the occurence of disfluencies under DAF in nonstutterers. However, no attempt has been made to determine the relative frequency of occurence of various types of disfluencies in nonstutterers under DAF. The present study investigated the frequency of occurence of various types of disfluencies in normal-speaking subjects in five successive oral readings under DAF. Twenty-four young adults read aloud a prose passage five times successively under 200 msec of bilateral DAF. Measures of the frequency of different types of disfluencies, locus of occurence of disfluencies in the speech sample, adaptation and consistency indicate that DAF-induced disfluencies are remarkably similar to those found in stuttering. It is suggested that DAF and stuttering disrupt speech at approximately the same “level” along the speech production process, possibly at the prosodic level.     

Sex-role self-concept and persistence in a traditional vs nontraditional college major for women

This article reports a 3-year follow-up study of a sample of women engineering and home economics majors who were previously studied as freshmen. It was hypothesized that persistence in the two curricula would be related to sex roles, with feminine-typed women more likely to leave engineering and masculine-typed women more likely to leave home economics. The findings did not generally support this hypothesis, however. Women in the two majors who persisted were not found to differ significantly from women who changed majors or dropped out on either sex roles or on ratings given as freshmen of their satisfaction with and certainty of college major. Persisters in engineering had higher college entrance SAT math scores than changers or dropouts. Those who changed majors from home economics tended to go into less traditional fields than home economics. Nearly all of the women who changed from engineering chose another nontraditional or male-dominated field as their second major.