Factors affecting judgments of fluency: I. interjections

Six speech samples containing varying amounts of schwa interjections were tape-recorded and presented to 36 male and 36 female listeners. For each sample, listeners were asked to make judgments of fluent, disfluent, and stuttered speech, and to answer the question “Would you recommend speech therapy?” Results indicated that speech samples containing 5% or more interjections evoked a judgment of disfluent speech by a majority of listeners. The sample containing 20% interjections, however, was found to evoke judgments of disfluent and stuttered speech about equally. Varying numbers of listeners recommended clinical services for disfluent speech. In general, the results indicated that (1) the presence of interjections in connected speech is not normal regardless of frequency, (2) fluent speech may not contain interjections in excess of 5%, and (3) with 20% interjections in speech, the distinction between disfluency and stuttering may be blurred.     

Outcome predictors in the behavioral treatment of stuttering

The MMPI and subscales of the Stuttering Severity scale were utilized to predict motivation and success in the behavioral treatment of 32 stutterers. Subjects spent a mean of 10 individual sessions in criterion-oriented learning of fluent speech based on speech-muscle relaxation aided by EMG visual biofeedback. Judged motivation and judged success were strongly related to each other and significantly related to MMPI K and Es scores and negatively to F and Sc. Actual success was negatively related to Sc and Pd, completely unrelated to Es, and (if anything) negatively related to K. Results are consistent with previous studies, and show that global judgements of progress were only minimally related to a measure of actual progress.     

Differences in human ability to judge veracity from the audio medium

The few past studies in this topic area have consistently found that human subjects, as a group, are able to judge veracity better than chance; but no findings have been published relating individual differences to judgmental accuracy. Thus the present study was designed as a first step in filling this knowledge gap. To create a stimulus set of lies and truths, which listeners would later judge for veracity, a method was employed that generated 10 audio-tape recorded lies and 10 audio-tape recorded truths. Each of 100 subject-listeners judged each audio-tape for veracity, and also provided information on a set of personological variables. Listener, as a group, were significantly better than chance in accurately judging veracity (p < .001). In addition, a set of personological variables (social intelligence, field dependence/independence, number of siblings, TV viewing habits, and confidence in judgments) was identified that accounted for 22% of the variance in accuracy (p < .0002). It is acknowledged that these findings are tentative and will require replication before they can be regarded as reliable or valid.     

Directionally different expectancy theory predictions of work motivation and job satisfaction

Conventionally, expectancy theory has utilized a multiplicative combination of expectancy and value scores in predicting both job behavior (work motivation and job performance) and job-related affect (job satisfaction). An extensive clinical literature, however, suggests that affect is a function of the discrepancy between expectancies and values. Hence, two hypotheses were advanced and tested in organizational settings: (1) that the multiplicative formulation (EV) will yield superior predictions of work motivation and job performance in comparison to the discrepancy model (E-V), (2) that the discrepancy model (E-V) will yield superior predictions of job satisfaction in comparison to the multiplicative model (EV). Results from three studies (of 399 engineers, 202 librarians, and 1,777 engineers) were highly supportive of both hypotheses.An early version of this paper was presented at the 10th Annual National Meeting of the American Institute for Decision Sciences, November 1, 1978, and an abbreviated write-up appeared in the AIDSProceedings. The author is greatly indebted to the following people: Susanne P. Wahba, for allowing the use of her data (Study Two); Gene Dalton and Paul Thompson, for their contribution to the research in Study One; and Joe Folkman for his help with the data analysis in Study Three. Financial support was provided in part by the Research Foundation of the City University of New York (RF10662).     

Cross-enhancement of the sour taste on single human taste papillae

The subjective intensity of one taste quality can be increased by prior exposure of the tongue to a different taste quality stimulus. This phenomenon, called cross-enhancement, may be the result of interactions among the physiological mechanisms that code taste quality. Another possible explanation is that the water solvent of the second stimulus acquires a taste after exposure of the tongue to the first stimulus. This water taste could add to the taste of the solute in the second stimulus and result in an increase of its subjective intensity. A third possibility is that taste receptors on the tongue may be sensitized by exposure to a taste stimulus. Using a small number of highly trained subjects, we have demonstrated that sucrose can enhance the intensity of an acid taste on the single papilla. Neither water taste nor sweet taste system activation played any role in the mediation of this enhancement. Through a series of experimentally derived inferential steps, we conclude that this phenomenon depends on the removal of protons from the acid receptors. In addition, we have demonstrated in the single papilla, that suppression of the acid taste when in mixture with sucrose can occur without sweet system activity. We conclude that sugars, through their capacity to bind protons, act to reduce the availability of protons to the acid receptors.     

Attraction increases and decreases as a function of emotion-attribution and appropriate social cues

To study the impact of startle-induced arousal on attraction, blindfolded subjects in a “vestibular function” study were startled by a loud noise accompanying the sudden backward tilt of the dental chair in which they were seated. In Study I, startled male subjects indicated (on a “postexperimental” questionnaire) greater attraction toward a pretty female experimenter than did control subjects. Study II demonstrated the reverse, with startled male subjects disliking a male experimenter more than controls. In Study III, female subjects startled by a male experimenter indicated greater attraction than controls, although the pattern of their responses differed from males. While an attempt to induce misattribution of arousal to a (placebo) pill (Study IV) or to a noise (Study V) with “arousal” side effects resulted in negligible attenuation effects on the startle—attraction relationship, in Study VI the imposition of a delay period between startle and experimenter ratings resulted in reduced ratings of attraction. The role of arousal in romantic attraction is briefly discussed, and the relevance of these data to theories of emotion is considered.     

Absolute and relative cues for the auditory perception of egocentric distance

Three experiments were performed to examine the reverberation cue to egocentric auditory distance and to determine the extent to which such a cue could provide 'absolute', as contrasted with 'relative', information about distance. In experiment 1 independent groups of blindfolded observers (200 altogether) were presented with broadband noise from a speaker at one of five different distances (0.55 to 8 m) in a normal hard-walled room. Half of each group of observers were presented with the sound at 0 deg azimuth, followed (after a delay) by the identical sound at 90 deg azimuth. The order of presentation was reversed for the remaining observers. Perceived distance varied significantly as a function of the physical distance to the speaker, even for the first presentations. The change in the binaural information between the 0 deg and 90 deg presentations did not significantly modify the results. For both orientations, near distances were overestimated and far distances were underestimated. Experiment 2 and 3 were designed to evaluate how much prior auditory exposure to the laboratory environment was necessary. A 200 Hz square-wave signal was presented from one of three distances (1, 2, or 6 m) to observers who had either minimal room information or an exposure which included talking within the room. Perceived distance varied significantly with physical distance regardless to exposure condition.