Effects of auditory masking by white noise on primary stressing during spontaneous speech

6 adult subjects (3 men, 3 women) produced highly similar spontaneous speech utterances in quiet and with 90-dB SPL white noise. The frequency of occurrence of perceptual judgments of primary stressing in an utterance was not affected by the masking noise. This finding supplements our previous report that variability for stress production of fundamental frequency (fo) during spontaneous speech was preserved under short-term auditory disruption. Also, it adds further support to the contention that fo is under open-loop regulation.     

Effect of moderate doses of alcohol on simple auditory reaction time in a vigilance setting

An experiment was performed with 11 voluntary male subjects to test the effects of moderate doses of alcohol on simple auditory RT in a vigilance setting. Subjects were tested during a 30-min. session, during which signals were presented with an average intersignal interval of 3.75 sec. Subjects responded by pressing a microswitch held in the preferred hand. Analysis indicated that absolute means increased as a function of alcohol dose. With time-on-task alcohol produced a faster increase in RT and especially affected the longest RTs. Number of extreme long reactions (blockings) and mean duration of these reactions increased under alcohol and were directly related to time on task; alcohol produced a much faster increase in number of blockings with time on task. Results were discussed in terms of attentional processes and habituation theory. Some practical implications of the results were pointed out.     

Children's perception of parental exercise: influence of sex and age

The purpose of the study was to document children's perception of parental exercise, relating these perceptions to (1) the self-reported parents' habits of exercise, and (2) the children's own activity patterns. The subjects were 198 students of both sexes, aged 12 to 14 yr. and enrolled in school Grades 7 to 9. A standard questionnaire assessed their perceptions of parental and personal physical activity. Both parents of each subject also reported their respective levels of habitual physical activity. Congruence between the children's perceptions and the self-reported exercise habits of the opposite-sex parent differed for boys and girls, increasing for boys and decreasing for girls between Grades 7 and 9. No significant associations were observed between the children's perception of parental exercise patterns and their own like habits. This suggests that during adolescence parental influences are minimized by other factors, personal or environmental.     

Context-dependent effects on analogical transfer

The role of context in facilitating analogical transfer was investigated in two experiments. In both experiments, subjects first read two stories that were analogous to Duncker’s (1945) radiation problem. Later, subjects attempted to solve the radiation problem. In Experiment 1, the radiation problem was presented in a different context than that of the stories, and followed them by 6 min. Transfer was observed in subjects who were prompted to use the earlier stories in solving the problem. However, the solution frequency of subjects not given such prompts did not differ from control levels. In Experiment 2, the radiation problem was presented in the same context as the earlier stories to some subjects, and in a different context to others. The timing of the radiation problem also was varied. When a 6-min interval separated the stories from the radiation problem, transfer was a function of context, with weak transfer being observed in the samecontext condition, and no transfer being observed in the different-context condition. At a 45-sec delay, transfer was again observed in the same~ontext condition, and a nonsignificant trend toward transfer was observed in the different-context condition. The results were interpreted as indicating that context facilitates the retrieval of relevant problem-solving schemas, and as suggesting that the possession of relevant schemas is not sufficient to produce analogical transfer.     

Interpersonal dominance and coronary prone behavior

Type A “coronary-prone behavior” is a risk factor for coronary artery and heart disease. Questionnaire research indicates that interpersonal dominance is one of the strongest behavioral correlates of the Type A behavior pattern, although little effort has been made to demonstrate a link between the behavioral manifestations of interpersonal dominance and Pattern A responding. This study was conducted to establish such a link. All possible combinations of extreme As (N = 42) and Bs (N = 42) were matched in dyads that negotiated extreme bipolar opposite positions on a “teacher dismissal” issue. Analysis of process and outcome behaviors suggested that type A individuals are unilaterally more dominant than their Type B counterparts. Possible physiological mechanisms mediating dominance and cardiovascular disease are discussed.     

Pupillary responses to syntactic ambiguity of sentences

Pupillary responses have proven to be reliable physiological correlates of cognitive effort in a variety of tasks, including language processing. To investigate the relation between psychological and syntactic complexity 20 syntactically ambiguous sentences, balanced for bias, were presented to 16 subjects, while their pupil size was continuously measured. These sentences could be read as verb oriented (syntactically more complex) or object oriented (syntactically less complex). Principal components analysis of pupillary movements revealed that verb-oriented readings, resulted in greater pupillary dilations than object-oriented readings, indicating that syntactically more complex sentences, as determined via a formal grammar, require greater cognitive effort in processing. This is viewed as further evidence for the notion that syntactic and psychological complexity are related. High- and low-bias sentences did not induce comparable differences in pupillary movements, indicating that the "multiple meaning theory" may have to be modified.     

An investigation of the ability to process inferences in language following right hemisphere brain damage

Twenty-two right hemisphere brain-damaged and 22 non-brain-damaged patients were given a multiple-choice recognition task which contained true statements, statements which were inferentially true but not actually heard before, and false statements. It was hypothesized that if right hemisphere brain damage disturbs the ability to comprehend inferences, these subjects, unlike their normal counterparts, would not falsely recognize true inferences as heard before. This hypothesis was not confirmed. However, the right hemisphere group was poorer than controls at rejecting false statements. This behavior was speculated to be a retrieval difficulty, which was exacerbated if the information contained spatial or semantically similar material.