Hemispheric specialization for temporal information: Implications for the perception of voicing cues during speech perception

Developmental research reporting electrophysiological correlates of voice onset time (VOT) during speech perception is reviewed. By two months of age a right hemisphere mechanism appears which differentiates voiced from voiceless stop consonants. This mechanism was found at 4 years of age and again with adults.A new study is described which represents an attempt to determine a more specific basis for VOT perception. Auditory evoked responses (AER) were recorded over the left and right hemispheres while 16 adults attended to repetitive series of two-tone stimuli. Portions of the AERs were found to vary systematically over the two hemispheres in a manner similar to that previously reported for VOT stimuli. These findings are discussed in terms of a temporal detection mechanism which is involved in speech perception.     

Cortical involvement in the semantic processing of coarticulated speech cues

Auditory evoked responses (AER) were recorded from scalp locations over the left and right temporal regions in response to CVC words and nonsense syllables. Various components of the AER were found to vary systematically with changes in stimulus meaning. One such component reflected subcortical involvement in semantic processing. Other components reflected changes in voicing and place of articulation as well as hemisphere differences.     

An auditory evoked potential study of consonant perception in different vowel environments

Auditory evoked responses (AER) to series of consonant—vowel syllables were recorded from temporal and parietal scalp locations from 20 right-handed female college students. Averaged AERs were submitted to principal components analysis and analysis of variance. Seven 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 independent of the following vowel sound. A second component changed systematically over both hemispheres in response to only consonant changes. A third component systematically changed for the different consonants depending on the following vowel.     

Neuroelectrical correlates of categorical speech perception in adults

Auditory evoked potentials were recorded from the left and right hemispheres of 16 adults during a phoneme identification task. The use of multivariate statistics enabled researchers to identify a number of cortical processes related to categorical speech perception which were common to both hemispheres, as well as several which disinguished between the two hemispheres.     

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.     

The right hemisphere and temporal processing of consonant transition durations: electrophysiological correlates

Auditory evoked responses (AER) were recorded from frontal, temporal, and parietal scalp regions to a series of consonant-vowel syllables which varied in the duration of the consonant transition. Multivariate analyses of the AER waveforms identified one component of the AERs occurring only over right hemisphere regions which discriminated between differences in transition durations. A second component detected over only left hemisphere areas discriminated differences in place of articulation. These data are consistent with previous behavioral and electrophysiological reports that the right hemisphere is sensitive to temporal discriminations.     

Neuroelectrical correlates of hemisphere and handedness factors in a cognitive task

Principal-components analysis was performed on a set of averaged evoked potentials in order to extract components of cerebral activity functionally related to hemisphere, handedness, processing task, and stimulus feature variables. Eight such components were isolated. Degree of dextrality, hemispheric differences, and cognitive operations in processing distinct stimulus characteristics were identified as reflected in functionally distinct components of brain activity.     

Learning conditional frequencies in a probability learning task

The study was prompted by a theoretical discussion of probability learning by Estes (1976). In three separate experiments, subjects were presented with frequency information in the form of wins and losses among 3 teams, and later predicted future wins and losses. Frequencies were devised so that conditional win frequencies for a pair of teams were either inconsistent or consistent with marginal win frequencies for each team. In experiment 1, when subjects predicted future events on the basis of known past frequencies, predictions were generally based on conditional frequencies. In experiment 2 six blocks of observations were presented, with predictions following each block. What little learning did occur was in the direction of the conditional frequencies. Subjects in experiment 3 were able to learn conditional frequencies when given explicit instructions to do so. Results were discussed in terms of a two-stage hypothesis generation model that might operate within the framework of an associative theory of probability learning.     

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.     

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.     

The relationships among cognitive development,locus of control,and gender

Research has shown that perhaps 50% of all adults in this country are not able to perform abstract reasoning tasks described as formal opertions in the Piagetian cognitive developmental framework. Abstract reasoning is related to an individual's ability to perceive contingencies between their actions and subsequent outcomes. This pattern is seen as crucial for the development of an internal locus of control. Fifty-eight male and female undergraduates completed the Rotter Internal-External scale and a Cognitive Developmental Level assessment. For women, a highly significant inverse relationship was demonstrated between cognitive developmental level and locus of control. Women with higher levels of cognitive development were more likely to be internal. For men, no such relationship was found. Such results suggest that locus of control develops differently in men and women.     

Some implications for psychological research of early versus late term participation by college subjects

Several surveys of recent psychological literature have indicated that a large percentage of human subjects are introductory psychology students who are given the option of selecting when to participate in research which is either implicitly or explicitly required of them. The present study was conducted to investigate the possibility that those subjects who choose to participate early in the term differ in personality and in attitudes toward research from later term participants. Results indicated that early term males and females, as expected, were more academically oriented and more internally controlled than late term subjects; and early term males were more achievement oriented than their late term counterparts. Additionally, females were found to feel more positive toward research participation than males; while a large percentage of all subjects reported both suspiciousness of experimenter intent and a general and unexpected willingness to voluntarily participate as subjects. Possible effects of these findings on research results and conclusions were discussed, and suggestions for improvements aimed at reducing self-selection bias in college subject pools were made.     

Training cooperation in the Prisoner's Dilemma

Female Ss' choices in two types of mixed-motive game situations were used to select Ss who had predominantly Own Gain and Ss who had predominantly Relative Gain goals. On the basis of simple reward notions, it was predicted that the former but not the latter would change from competitive to cooperative responding in decomposed Prisoner's Dilemma game situations when interacting with a conditionally cooperative other. Corresponding yoked controls were not expected to become cooperative. The availability of social comparison with an outcome which was smaller than the mutually cooperative outcome but larger than the mutually competitive out-come was expected to lead Own Gain Ss to more rapid learning of cooperation but not to affect the responses of corresponding yoked controls or of Relative Gain Ss. A 2 × 2 × 2 × 5 factorial design was used in which the factors were goal orientation (Own Gain vs Relative Gain), strategy of the other (conditionally cooperative vs yoked control), the availability vs unavailability of the social comparison, and trials. The results strongly supported each of the expectations. The results were discussed in terms of how the operation of the reward mechanism would be affected by the operation of some other social psychological processes.     

An occupational taxonomy by professional characteristics: Implications for research

Theorists concerned with the nature of professionalism and researchers investigating professionals in the work environment often assume that professional occupations are a unique occupational type. To test this assumption, an occupational taxonomy based on nine dimensions of professionalism was derived empirically. The taxonomy represented expectations only to a moderate degree. Several implications were noted for the use of occupational taxonomies in the generalization of research findings on one occupational group to other occupational groups in the same classification.     

Recognition memory in hearing-impaired children: A levels-of-processing approach

Eighty-nine hearing-impaired children ranging in age from 6 years to 12 years, 11 months were given a recognition task comprised of items from the Raven Coloured Progressive Matrices and the Raven Learning Potential Test following administration of the Raven Coloured Progressive Matrices. The study was designed to determine whether recognition memory varied as a function of item type. The analysis indicated that performance on items involving analogous reasoning exceeded recognition for items requiring pattern completion through closure, which, in turn, exceeded performance for items involving simple pattern completion. Results are discussed in light of levels-of-processing.     

A test of the hypothesis about the two-dimensional nature of the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability scale

This paper presents the results from two related studies concerning the internal structure of the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability (MD-SD) scale. Study 1 tested the hypothesis that attribution and denial are two major components of the MC-SD scale by factoring the intercorrelations among the MC-SD items using the correlated multiple-group common factor analysis, and the results supported the hypothesis. Study 2 investigated the differential validity of these components for predicting scores on the Lie scale, the K scale, and the Repression-Sensitization scale. The attribution and denial components were found to be differentially related to the K scale and the Repression-Sensitization scale but not the Lie scale. These results were also interpreted as partially supporting the hypothesis.