Family therapy with deaf persons: the systemic utilization of an interpreter

This paper discusses the theory and practice of providing family therapy to families in which there are hearing parents and at least one Deaf child, particularly regarding the optimal utilization of an interpreter. The therapist must be knowledgeable about the psychosocial effects of deafness, the cultural aspects of deafness, and preferably be able to use American Sign Language and Signed English. The therapeutic benefit of utilizing an interpreter extends far beyond simply facilitating communication between each family member whose primary-language is either spoken English or Sign Language. The presence of an interpreter helps the therapist to modify family rules that deny the implications of deafness and prohibit the use of Sign Language, to modify the balance of power in the family, and to encourage participants to exhibit the ego defense mechanisms of projection and transference. The family therapist can utilize those subtle yet profound influences to therapeutic advantage.     

AN ALTERNATING TREATMENTS COMPARISON OF ORAL AND TOTAL COMMUNICATION TRAINING WITH MINIMALLY VERBAL RETARDED CHILDREN

This study was a comparison of the effects of oral speech with total communication (speech plus sign language) training on the ability of mentally retarded children to repeat 4-word sentences. Three children were chosen who used single words to communicate but who did not combine words into complete sentences. Three sentence pairs were trained, with each pair having one sentence trained using oral methods and an equivalent one trained using the total communication approach. Both training procedures involved chaining sentence parts, reinforcement, and prompting. Oral methods involved presenting vocal stimuli and requiring vocal responses whereas total communication methods involved presenting vocal and signed stimuli and requiring vocal and signed responses. For the initial sentence pair with each child, an alternating treatments design was used to determine the relative efficacy of the two language training approaches. This was repeated with a second and third sentence pair using a multiprobe technique within a multiple baseline design. Results pointed to the superiority of the total communication approach in facilitating sentence repetition. Possible explanations of these results are offered and the utility of the alternating treatments experimental design is discussed.     

THE IMPACT OF PSYCHOLOGICAL TESTING ON EDUCATIONAL AND PERSONNEL SELECTION IN AFRICA

Psychological testing for Education and Personnel selection is of great importance in the efforts by many African countries to ensure that suitable candidates are selected for education beyond the primary school level and for training for different employment. Major investigations directed to this need have been in the area of adapting tests already available in Western countries and determining the reliability and predictive validity of battery of tests so adapted and their tryout in African schools to determine their efficiency as tools for selection.     

Delayed reinforcement as an indiscriminable contingency in verbal/nonverbal correspondence training

We investigated the programming of generalization and maintenance of correspondence between verbal and nonverbal behavior in a preschool setting. Four children participated in a series of multiple-baseline designs. In Experiment 1, delayed reinforcement of verbal behavior effectively controlled maintenance of correspondence with previously trained responses and also resulted in generalization of correspondence to one untrained response. As the latter effect was limited, Experiment 2 was a further assessment of the effects of delayed reinforcement of generalization of correspondence to untrained responses, and consistent generalization was shown. Experiment 2 also showed that generalization, if lost, could be recovered through use of "booster training," in which the original contingencies were reinstated for a brief period. Experiment 3 provided replications, with two additional children, of the effects of delayed reinforcement on maintenance of correspondence. Results are discussed in terms of using delayed reinforcement as an indiscriminable contingency.     

Trading relations in the perception of speech by 5-year-old children

Five-year-old children were tested for perceptual trading relations between a temporal cue (silence duration) and a spectral cue (F₁ onset frequency) for the “say-stay” distinction. Identification functions were obtained for two synthetic “say-stay” continua, each containing systematic variations in the amount of silence following the /s/ noise. In one continuum, the vocalic portion had a lower F₁ onset than in the other continuum. Children showed a smaller trading relation than has been found with adults. They did not differ from adults, however, in their perception of an “ay-day” continuum formed by varying F₁ onset frequency only. The results of a discrimination task in which the two acoustic cues were made to “cooperate” or “conflict” phonetically supported the notion of perceptual equivalence of the temporal and spectral cues along a single phonetic dimension. The results indicate that young children, like adults, perceptually integrate multiple cues to a speech contrast in a phonetically relevant manner, but that they may not give the same perceptual weights to the various cues as do adults.     

More precisely defining and measuring the order-irrelevance principle

R. Gelman and C. Gallistel (1978, Young Children's Understanding of Number, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press) use two definitions of the order-irrelevance principle interchangeably: (1) count tags do not have to be assigned in a fixed order and (2) the order in which elements of a set are enumerated does not affect the cardinal designation of the set. A study involving 107 kindergarten and first grade children indicates that the two are actually distinct concepts. Apparently, a willingness to arbitrarily assign tags is a developmentally less sophisticated ability than--and hence does not necessarily imply--an ability to predict that differently ordered counts produce the same cardinal designation. Thus it appears that evidence of the second ability is necessary to infer a full understanding of the order-irrelevance principle. The first ability alone implies what might better be termed an "order-indifferent tagging scheme." Suggestions for measuring and further researching the order-irrelevance principle are discussed.     

The role of self-produced movement and visual tracking in infant spatial orientation

In two longitudinal studies, infants were trained at 12 and 18 months to find an object hidden in one of two identical wells in a Plexiglas box. On the test trial, normal access was blocked and infants were either guided by their mother or allowed to move on their own to another opening on the opposite side. In Experiment 1 significantly more correct responding occurred after active movement than after passive at 12 months, with correct responding related to high visual tracking. In contrast, at 18 months correct search without tracking predominated among both movement conditions. A difference between the conditions in the position of the mother on the test trial was ruled out as a contributor to performance on the basis of data from Experiment 2. When opaque sides were inserted to prevent tracking in Experiment 3, active movement no longer facilitated correct search at 12 months, thus indicating that the tracking and not the active movement per se was the critical factor.