Adaptation to delayed auditory feedback

Delayed auditory feedback disrupts the production of speech, causing an increase in speech duration as well as many articulatory errors. To determine whether prolonged exposure to delayed auditory feedback IDAFI leads to adaptive compensations in speech production, 10 subjects were exposed in separate experimental sessions to both incremental and constantdelay exposure conditions. Significant adaptation occurred for syntactically structured stimuli in the form of increased speaking rates. After DAF was removed, aftereffects were apparent for all stimulus types in terms of increased speech rates. A carry-over effect from the first to the second experimental session was evident as long as 29 days after the first session. The use of strategies to overcome DAF and the differences between adaptation to DAF and adaptation to visual rearrangement are discussed.     

Law enforcement and crisis intervention services: a critical relationship

Law-enforcement officers tend to look at traditional mental health services as being of little help to them in dealing with persons they encounter experiencing emotional emergencies. They are frequently skeptical that emergency mental health programs offer more than they deliver. Because of their traditional base as the primary, and frequently only, available emergency "field" service in a community, a mental health emergency program must have a cooperative working relationship with law enforcement to serve a community successfully. This paper describes the development and maintenance of such a relationship, designed to increase the police case-finding potential.     

The decision to return to college: Role concepts,personality, attitudes,and significant others

In two studies, personality, role concepts, and attitudes distinguished wives and mothers who decided to resume college from those who did not. College women and women about to resume college had more self-actualizing, achievement-oriented, and dominant personalities (California Psychological Inventory); broader, more personalized role concepts; more liberal attitudes; better educated husbands; and fewer children than housewives. Measurements before college return and during the second year at college indicated that college exposure did not significantly affect these variables. The single exception was that after college exposure, women no longer saw society as supporting their efforts to actualize their potentials.A version of this paper was presented at the 83rd Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, Chicago, August 31, 1975.     

The product of the consensus Rorschach in families of male schizophrenics.

A consensus Rorschach was given to the families of 36 male schizophrenics, 13 psychiatrically hospitalized nonschizophrenic controls, and 38 normal controls with the goal of discriminating the families of schizophrenics from the other two groups of families. After the family agreed on a response, each member was asked to write the response on a separate sheet of paper. This study focused on these written responses, the product of the interaction, rather than on the process of reaching agreement. A system was developed to score the responses based on the degree of shared meaning achieved by the family. Adequate interscorer reliability was obtained. The scores significantly differentiated the three groups. More families of schizophrenics had low scores indicating lack of shared meaning than families of hospitalized and normal controls. In the normal control group, more upper-class families had high scores than lower-class families, wheras in the schizophrenic group there was a trend in the opposite direction.     

The influence of syntactic segmentation on perceived stress

Chomsky and Halle (1968) claim that the stress and intonation of an utterance are not determined solely by physical properties of the acoustic signal but are also influenced by the syntactic organization of the utterance. Strong support for their contention has been obtained by presenting listeners with a continuously repeated string of monosyllabic words. Such sequences undergo spontaneous perceptual re-grouping sometimes producing strings with different syntactic organizations; such syntactic changes are accompanied by immediate and dramatic changes in apparent stress and intonation although the physical signal itself never varies.     

THE GENERALIZATION EFFECTS OF PARENT TRAINING ACROSS STIMULUS SETTINGS

Five parents of nonverbal children were trained in two home settings to modify antecedents and consequences to their children's vocalizations. Generalization effects of the parent training on both the parent's and children's behaviors under different stimulus conditions were investigated using multiple-baseline designs. Increases in parent prompting and reinforcing their children's vocalizations generalized only minimally to a new setting in the home where parent training had not occurred. Child increases in vocalizations produced by the parents in the training settings did generalize to this new setting in the home. There was minimal generalization of child vocalizations to a free-play setting at school. In a formal speech session conducted by a behavior specialist at school, only one child showed definite increases in acquisition rate as a function of the parents starting to train the sound at home.     

Rapid educational rehabilitation for prison inmates

One of the major goals of prisons has been the educational rehabilitation of inmates. Studies have shown that predelinquents as well as delinquents could be motivated to achieve in academic areas through the use of an incentive system. The present study attempted to extend the behavioral yield of such a system with prison inmates. The academic performance of two inmates in math and English were compared when two levels of incentives were made contingent on that performance. The results showed that the two inmates passed academic tests as much as nine times faster under an enriched schedule of incentives than under a standard one. This increase in rate of performance was translated into actual academic achievement as one of the inmates passed 9th through 12th grade algebra in only 14 days. A standardized test confirmed this academic advancement for both inmates. These high rates of performance and academic achievement are even more dramatic in view of the fact that five months prior to this procedure, both inmates had been tested as being below average in intelligence.