Measuring lexical diversity in children who stutter: application of vocd

There is growing but equivocal evidence that the language abilities of young children who stutter (CWS) may be depressed when compared to those of their fluent peers. In particular, the lexical skills of CWS have variously been reported to be weaker or stronger than comparison children in a number of recent studies. One source for such disagreement may be the measures used to compute lexical characteristics of these children’s spoken conversations. In this study, we examined the concurrent validity of two measures of lexical diversity in spontaneous language samples, Type-Token Ratio (TTR) and the newly developed utility vocd (Malvern & Richards, 1997), using a standard test of expressive vocabulary as the comparison measure. Findings indicated that vocd values (“D”) correlated well with standardized measures of expressive vocabulary, while TTR values did not. In addition, both the standardized measure and vocd revealed significantly poorer expressive lexical skills of CWS, whereas TTR analyses did not evidence this difference. Results are discussed in relation to the relative strength of vocd over TTR as a method for describing lexical characteristics of the spontaneous language samples of this population.

Educational objectives: The reader will learn about and be able to (1) identify several common measures of conversational vocabulary and the strengths and weaknesses of each, and (2) compare the performance of the young CWS in this study to their normally fluent peers in terms of vocabulary performance on both formal and conversational measures of vocabulary.     

Frequency of verb use in young children who stutter

Several recent studies have suggested that young children who stutter (CWS) tend to show depressed lexical performance relative to peers. Given the developmental literature as well as several studies of verb processing in individuals who stutter, verbs may pose a particular challenge for this group. The purpose of the present study was to examine verb use in CWS. In theory, if young CWS differ in their production of verbs, this finding would partially explain the findings of studies that probed conversational vocabulary skills more generally. Fifteen CWS and 15 children who do not stutter (CWNS) participated in a play-based conversational sample with a parent. Samples were analyzed for the total number of verbs, the number of different verbs, and the proportion of general all-purpose (GAP) verbs within the samples. CWS produced significantly fewer different verbs and total verbs than the CWNS. However, previously reported near-significant differences in utterance length between groups would appear to temper the robustness of this finding. The groups did not differ in the proportion of GAP verbs used, suggesting that the CWS did not over-rely on GAP verbs in conversational language production but rather used these verbs to the same extent as their peers. Educational objectives: As a result of this activity, the participant will be able to: (1) relate the purpose and rationale for examining verb use in children who stutter (CWS); (2) summarize the procedures used to assess verb use and GAP verb use in the present study; (3) explain the findings of the present study; (4) relate findings to the extant literature on lexical diversity in CWS.     

The norm of self-interest and its effects on social action

Four studies investigated whether people feel inhibited from engaging in social action incongruent with their apparent self-interest. Participants in Study 1 predicted that they would be evaluated negatively were they to take action on behalf of a cause in which they had no stake or in which they had a stake but held stake-incongruent attitudes. Participants in Study 2 reported both surprise and anger when a target person took action on behalf of a cause in which he or she had no stake or in which he or she held stake-incongruent attitudes. In Study 3, individuals felt more comfortable engaging in social action and expected others to respond more favorably toward their actions if the issue was described as more relevant to their own sex than to the opposite sex. In Study 4, the authors found that providing nonvested individuals with psychological standing rendered them as likely as vested individuals to undertake social action. The authors discuss the implications of these results for the relationship between vested interest, social action, and attitude-behavior consistency.     

Understanding children's activity memory: the role of outcomes

In three experiments the effectiveness of activity outcomes as memory cues was investigated. In the first experiment, 5-year-olds participated in four activities. In two of these activities, action results were maintained during the unfolding of the activity and perceptually preserved in the activity's end product. In the other two activities, action results "disappeared" from view during the activity and were transformed within the end product. Each activity was recalled under one of four cue conditions: verbal, object, action, and reenactment. For half of the children, the end product was also present during retrieval. Memory for the two types of activities varied with cue condition and with the presence of the end product. In a second experiment, children attempted to describe how the end products could be recreated from the materials used in the activities without participating in them. Patterns of performance confirmed that memory and not inference was responsible for the effects observed in the first experiment. In a third experiment, 5- and 7-year-olds participated in activities of the two types. Within each, picture supports were provided to investigate whether the perceptual availability of action results during encoding influences memory. Results are discussed with respect to an activity memory framework and implications for science education.     

Identity Distress During the Era of Globalization: A Cross-National Comparative Study of India,China, and the United States

In recent decades, globalization has become a growing concern for developing countries. Eastern countries in particular, who have traditionally adhered to group-focused interests and the development of an interpersonal sense of identity, have endured sweeping changes as Western values, opinions, and attitudes begin to pervade its younger generations. With the ease of connection that technological advances such as the Internet provides, late adolescents and emerging adults must negotiate between adopting an identity that is based on the traditional viewpoints of their local culture and adopting an identity that is consistent with the values of a global culture. In this study, the identity distress reported by 422 late-adolescent college students in India, China, and the United States was compared as it relates to the endorsement of individualistic and collectivistic value systems. Identity distress was found to significantly vary by country, with participants from China and India scoring significantly higher than those in the United States. Collectivism was associated with less identity distress in India and more distress in China. Reasons for this disparity are explored and questions for future research are discussed.     

Past tense marking in the spontaneous speech of preschool children who do and do not stutter

PurposeThe aim of this study was to identify whether different patterns of errors exist in irregular past-tense verbs in children who stutter (CWS) and children who do not stutter (CWNS).MethodSpontaneous language samples of thirty-one age- and gender-matched pairs of children (total N = 62) between the ages of 24 months and 59 months were analyzed.ResultsResults indicated that children who do and do not stutter over-regularize irregular past-tense verbs (i.e., saying runned for ran) with comparable frequency. However, two nonsignificant trends which suggest possible intra-group differences were noted. First, irregular past tense verbs represented a greater portion of total verbs for CWS than for CWNS. Second, CWS appeared to double-mark (i.e., say ranned for ran) more often than CWNS. Results are discussed in light of theories about the acquisition of the irregular past-tense and about differences in language skills between CWS and CWNS.Educational objectives: After reading this article, the reader will be able to: (a) summarize previous findings about connections between stuttering and language in CWS and CWNS; (b) describe similarities and differences between irregular past-tense verb use and errors in CWS and CWNS; (c) discuss possible connections between the declarative–procedural model and stuttering.     

Three questions about experimental extinction

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Distal cues and latent extinction

The Psychological Record - The hypothesis was tested that the failure of Bugelski et al (1952) to obtain latent extinction effects in a “replication” of Seward and Levy’s (1949)...     

Toward a description of language behavior: I. The speaking action

The Psychological Record -