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.     

A Decade Later: Black-White Attitudes Toward Women's Familial Role

A comparison of the perceptions of Black and White undergraduate students of the 1960's (n = 396) and 1970's (n = 587) of women's familial role using the Maferr Inventory of Feminine Values indicated an increasing liberalization of role concept across the decade. Most discrepancy occurred between white males' view of the Ideal woman and white females' view of man's Ideal Woman, with white women not believing the degree of liberalization of the white male's conception of Ideal Woman. Blacks in general have a more liberalized view of women's familial role, and there is less discrepancy between black males' and females' views of women's familial role than amongst whites. Women's Ideal Self is more traditional currently, than women's Actual Self.     

Semantic processing in dichotic listening? A replication

This experiment explores semantic processing of one message while another is attended to and shadowed. It was an attempt to replicate and clarify an earlier finding by Lewis (1970). Like Lewis, we found that mean shadowing latency was increased when a synonym of the shadowed word coincided with it on the unattended channel. However, this occurred only with synonyms in an early list position and appeared to affect only a small proportion of trials. The implications of this and other recent findings for theories of selective listening are discussed.     

Listening to speech at two levels at once

Monitoring performance was compared when subjects were asked to listen simultaneously for two different targets embedded in a sentence and when they listened only for one. The effects of different combinations of targets (phonemes, words, or meanings) were investigated and an attempt was made to separate the effects of particular combinations from the effects of difficulty of the two component targets. Performance was worse when either of two targets might occur than when subjects knew which single type to listen for. However there were no differences attributable to which particular types of targets were being combined. Listening for a phonemic target was as difficult to combine with listening for a semantic target as for another phonemic target. The result is consistent with a central speech analysing system whose limited processing capacity must be shared (at least in this monitoring task) both between and within all relevant levels of linguistic analysis, rather than with relatively independent subsystems for each type of listening.     

Non-spatial delayed alternation by the pigeon

Pigeons were trained on a non-spatial delayed alternation task in which the color not pecked on the previous trial was correct. When varying delays were interposed between trials, alternation accuracy decreased as a function of delay, but remained greater than chance with a 45-sec delay. Successful alternation on the longer delays was accomplished without behavioral mediation of the delay intervals. Also, during initial testing when a position cue was available in addition to the color cue after incorrect trials, alternation accuracy was greater after a preceding incorrect trial than after a correct trial. When the position cue was removed, no differences occurred as a function of the outcome of the preceding trial.     

Runway acquisition and extinction as a joint function of magnitude of reward and percentage of rewarded acquisition trials

To determine the joint effects of partial reward and reward magnitude on acquisition and extinction rates, and on acquisition and extinction asymptotes, 215 Wistar albino rats were trained in a Hunter straight runway. The experimental design was a 4 × 4 × 2 factorial combining four reward magnitudes, four reward percentages, and two experimenters. The data revealed that the acquisition rate was an increasing function of both percentage and magnitude of reward and that neither reward magnitude nor percentage of reward significantly affected acquisition asymptote. For extinction, it was found that, for continuous schedules, the larger the reward magnitude the less the resistance to extinction and, for partial schedules, the larger the reward magnitude the greater the resistance to extinction. These results were interpreted within the framework of the sequential effects hypothesis (Capaldi, 1966).