On the Strategic Weighting of Spectral Information in Consonant Identification

When identifying speech sounds, do listeners direct attention specifically to those frequency regions in which distinctive phonetic information is located? Scharf, Dai, and Miller (1988) concluded that they do, based on an experiment that involved listeners identifying the members of a pair of voiced stop consonants differing primarily in their third-formant transitions. Adding extra contrastive acoustic energy to the third-formant region of one of the consonants enhanced performance more than did adding energy to a region where the consonants were otherwise identical. The present experiments extended this paradigm to reveal evidence of an interaction between the frequency region in which extra distinctive energy was added and the class of consonant to which it was added. The results were more consistent with an account in terms of the effects of added energy on phonetic identity than one based on spectral selective attention.     

An empirical investigation of the specificity and sensitivity of the automatic thoughts questionnaire and dysfunctional attitudes scale

Cognitive assessment of depression is not well advanced and the evidence for the validity and reliability of measures is incomplete. This study examined two cognitive assessments of depression-the Automatic Thoughts Questionnaire (ATQ) and the Dysfunctional Attitudes Scale (DAS). There were two major objectives of this study. The first objective was to examine the ability of these two measures of cognitions to discriminate depressive symptomatology within a variety of sample populations-university undergraduate students, medical and psychiatric outpatients, and acute psychiatric inpatients. The second objective was to examine the ability of the ATQ and DAS succesfully to classify depressed and nondepressed patients. The results of this study suggest that the ATQ is a sensitive and specific measure of depression. Nonspecificity to the ATQ, however, was demonstrated in the substance abuse disorder group and the personality disorder group. In contrast, the DAS, although correlated with depressive symptomatology, was not found to be specific to depression.Part of this project is supported by a Special Project Grant from the University of Queensland to Dr. Oei.     

Validation of a clerical test using work samples

zWork simulation performance tests of filing and proofreading were the principal criteria in a validation study of a paper and pencil clerical selection test constructed by content-oriented methods; supervisory ratings were also used. Experiment 1 was a concurrent study using as subjects 59 provisional employees. Experiment 2 was a predictive study using as subjects 184 employees actually selected on the basis of test scores. In both studies, substantial correlations were found between scores on the selection test and performance on the work samples: Estimates of correlations in the original selection group ranged from .4 to .8. Correlations between the selection test and the supervisor ratings were significant in Experiment 1, but not in Experiment 2; even when significant, they were much lower than the correlations with the work samples. These results suggest the value of using work samples as criteria for validation studies. Implications for other validation efforts are considered.     

Review article

The Satanism Scare. James T. Richardson, Joel Best, and David G. Bromley, eds. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1991. 320 pp, £1750 (p/b).