Origins of the stuttering stereotype: stereotype formation through anchoring-adjustment

The stereotype of people who stutter is predominantly negative, holding that stutterers are excessively nervous, anxious, and reserved. The anchoring–adjustment hypothesis suggests that the stereotype of stuttering arises from a process of first anchoring the stereotype in personal feelings during times of normal speech disfluency, and then adjusting based on a rapid heuristic judgment. The current research sought to test this hypothesis, elaborating on previous research by [White, P. A., & Collins, S. R. (1984). Stereotype formation by inference: A possible explanation for the “stutterer” stereotype. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 27, 567–570]. Participants provided ratings of a hypothetical typical person who stutters, a person suffering from normal speech disfluency and a typical male on a 25-item semantic differential scale. Results showed a stereotype of people who stutter similar to that found in previous research. The pattern of results is consistent with the anchoring–adjustment hypothesis. Ratings of a male stutterer are very similar to a male experiencing temporary disfluency, both of which differ from ratings of a typical male. As expected, ratings of a stutterer show a small but statistically significant adjustment on several traits that makes the stereotype of stutterers less negative and less emotionally extreme than the temporarily disfluent male. Based on the results of this research, it appears that stereotype formation is a result of generalization and adjustment from personal experience during normal speech disfluency.

Educational objectives: The reader will be able to: (1) explain how the negative stereotype of people who stutter arises; (2) discuss the negative implications of stereotypes in the lives of people who stutter; and (3) summarize why the stereotype of people who stutter is so consistent and resistant to change.     

Action and object processing in aphasia: from nouns and verbs to the effect of manipulability

The processing of words and pictures representing actions and objects was tested in 21 aphasic patients and 20 healthy controls across three word production tasks: picture-naming (PN), single word reading (WR) and word repetition (WRP). Analysis 1 targeted task and lexical category (noun-verb), revealing worse performance on PN and verb items for both patients and control participants. For Analysis 2 we used data collected in a concurrent gesture norming study to re-categorize the noun-verb items along hand imagery parameters (i.e., objects that can/cannot be manipulated and actions which do/do not involve fine hand movements). Here, patients displayed relative difficulty with the 'manipulable' items, while controls displayed the opposite pattern. Therefore, whereas the noun-verb distinction resulted simply in lower verb accuracy across groups, the 'manipulability' distinction revealed a 'double-dissociation' between patients and control participants. These results carry implications for theories of embodiment, lexico-semantic dissociations, and the organization of meaning in the brain.     

Contextual influences on the internal structure of phonetic categories: A distinction between lexical status and speaking rate

Previous research has shown that phonetic categories have a graded internal structure that is highly dependent on acoustic-phonetic contextual factors, such as speaking rate; these factors alter not only the location of phonetic category boundaries, but also the location of a category’s best exemplars. The purpose of the present investigation, which focused on the voiceless category as specified by voice onset time (VOT), was to determine whether a higher order linguistic contextual factor, lexical status, which is known to alter the location of the voiced—voiceless phonetic category boundary, also alters the location of the best exemplars of the voiceless category. The results indicated that lexical status has a more limited and qualitatively different effect on the category’s best exemplars than does the acousticphonetic factor of speaking rate. This dissociation is discussed in terms of a production-based account in which perceived best exemplars of a category track contextual variation in speech production.     

Development of a Brief Multidimensional Aversion to Women Who Work Scale

A brief multidimensional measure of aversion to women who work (MAWWWS) was developed using data collected from 175 predominantly lower income Anglo American undergraduate and graduate students attending a medium-sized university located in the southern United States. Findings indicated that the 10-item measure exhibited acceptable reliability, as well as adequate convergent and criterion validities. Consequently, the MAWWWS may be a useful measure of employment-related gender attitudes.     

On the nature of perceptual limits in vision

Summary Studies of attention have generally assumed that the principal limit to visual perception involves the capacity to identify a stimulus. Analyses of responses in visual tasks, however, suggest that errors can arise from a loss of position information, as well as a loss of identity information, and that these two types of errors may be affected by different variables. Based on this, we have proposed that the difficult aspect of perception is not that of recognizing the form of the stimulus but rather determining its position relative to other items in the field. To demonstrate this, we conducted a series of experiments on lateral masking that showed that the failure to perceive a parafoveal stimulus surrounded by other items is due to two quite separate components: a loss of identity information induced by the immediately adjacent items and a loss of position information induced by both adjacent and non-adjacent items.This research was supported by grant A-9581 from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to the senior author. The first two experiments were reported in a paper to the annual meeting of the Psychonomics Society, San Antonio, 1984     

Do childhood anxiety measures measure anxiety?

The Fear Survey Schedule for Children-Revised (FSSC-R), Revised-Children's Manifest Anxiety Scale (RCMAS), and the Modified State-Trait Anxiety Inventory for Children (STAIC-M) are three widely used self-report measures of childhood anxiety. While previous studies have established the reliability of these measures, their validity in discriminating anxious from non-anxious youngsters remains to be established. The present study examines the discriminant validity of the three measures by comparing clinic referred samples of boys with an anxiety disorder (n=105) or ADHD (n=59) with a community sample of never-psychiatrically-ill boys (n=49). Results indicated that the two patient groups differed significantly from the never-psychiatrically-ill group on the RCMAS and STAIC-M, but the anxious and ADHD groups did not differ from each other. None of the three groups differed on the FSSC-R. The implications of these findings for the assessment of childhood anxiety disorders are discussed.     

Frog skin,time series,and other kinds of data: Nonisomorphic representation and analysis

Representational art is spatially congruent, or isomorphic, with objects in the world. In other words, they are the same in some important way. But not all representation is isomorphic. Data graphs are a type of nonisomorphic representation. A major goal of data graphs is to facilitate the rapid comprehension of differences or relations. This is done by providing a kind of analogy between something that can be “seen” (the relative heights of points) and some relevant information. This article discusses some rules about data graphing, then some new visualization tools are briefly critiqued.     

Subject-pool record keeping: A database application

This paper describes a record-keeping system we developed for our subject pool, utilizing ORACLE database software on a VAX computer. This system consists of three data tables and four processes: set up, updating, report generation, and editing. This article describes the rationale and function of each of these four processes in detail. All input and output is in ASCII format. The combination of ASCII files and the ORACLE database system produces a subject-pool recordkeeping system that is adaptable, expandable, and exportable.     

Reading skill and the use of orthographic knowledge by Mature Readers

Summary Butler and Hains (1979) found individual differences in the effect of word length on RT in word naming and lexical-decision tasks; subjects scoring high on a vocabulary test were much less affected by word length than subjects with low scores. The present study attempted to determine whether such differences could be due to differences in the use of intraword structure, since word recognition has been linked, both empirically (Mason, 1978; Scheerer-Neumann, 1981) and theoretically (Mewhort & Campbell, 1981) to the use of orthographic redundancy. In Experiment 1, subjects were shown tachistoscopically presented letter strings varying in approximation to English. High vocabulary subjects were more capable of capitalizing on the redundancy with the higher-order approximations. Experiment 2 then established that performance on the vocabulary test was correlated with reading skill, measured by the Nelson-Denny Reading Test, and that skilled readers were more sensitive to the syllable structure in words. In the experiment, subjects were shown eight-letter words presented as three separate word units which either matched or violated syllable boundaries in the word. Skilled readers were more sensitive to the difference between syllable and nonsyllable units than were less skilled readers. The results obtained by Butler and Hains appear to reflect differences in reading skill and the efficiency of letter sequence parsing prior to word recognition.