The role of distinctive features in the dichotic perception of vowels

A dichotic listening experiment was conducted to determine if vowel perception is based on phonetic feature extraction as is consonant perception. Twenty normal right-handed subjects were given dichotic CV syllables contrasting in final vowels. It was found that, unlike consonants, the perception of dichotic vowels was not significantly lateralized, that the dichotic perception of vowels was not significantly enhanced by the number of phonetic features shared, and that the occurrence of double-blend errors was not greater than chance. However, there was strong evidence for the use of phonetic features at the level of response organization. It is suggested that the differences between vowel and consonant perception reflect the differential availability of the underlying acoustic information from auditory store, rather than differences in processing mechanisms.     

Control of selective echolalia via the instatement of a general alternative response

Treatment for echolalic responding has been limited to the training of a small number of correct responses and limited stimulus verbalizations by the experimenter, leaving the possibility that the introduction of novel stimuli could result in the reoccurrence of echolalia. In the present study an 11-year-old severely retarded male's echolalic responding to questions that he could not answer correctly was controlled by instating a general alternative response, “I don't know.” The subject continued to respond correctly to questions that he could answer. indicating that the general alternative response had been appropriately discriminated. A Baseline. Treatment. DRO. Treatment design indicated that the subject's echolalic responding, as well as the appropriate use of the general alternative response, was under experimental control. Generalization of the experimental results to the subject's regular day-care setting was accomplished by having the staff verbally punish all echolalic responses and then restate the question to the subject until a non-echolalic answer had been emitted. Implications of these findings and suggestions for combining previous treatment procedures for echolalia with the general alternative response procedure were offered.     

Distraction,amnesia, and the next-in-line effect

Two studies use a free recall task to track, moment by moment, cognitive repercussions of an upcoming performance. As in earlier research, subjects display impaired recall for events which immediately precede an anticipated public performance. This “next-in-line effect” occurs even if the “performance” consists of reading a word to oneself. However, subjects show no memory deficit if their performance is not anticipated, and they have generally poor recall if they know they will be performing—but not when. Distraction and amnesia accounts of these recall deficits are discussed. Ancillary findings illuminate the organization of memory in social settings.     

Physiological arousal,exposure to a relatively lengthy aggressive film,and aggressive behavior

Male college students viewed either a 15-minute aggressive television program excerpt or a neutral one. Half of the students in each group were then angered or treated in a neutral fashion by a confederate. Each subject was allowed to retaliate by delivering electric shocks to the confederate as an evaluation of a problem solution he supposedly had completed. Heart rate was measured (a) before exposure to the television program, (b) after exposure to the program, (c) immediately before delivering the shock, and (d) immediately after shock delivery. Angered men who had seen the aggressive film were most aggressive toward the confederate and exhibited the lowest average pulse rates both before and after shock delivery. The findings are discussed in terms of their implication for arousal vs disinhibition conceptualizations of aggressive behaviors following exposure to television violence.     

Spelling dyslexia: A form of cross-cuing

A patient with spelling dyslexia maintained the ability to write, spell, and pronounce spelled nonsense words and words that require knowledge of orthographic rules of language. He was unable to perform grapheme-phoneme conversions except after naming the letter involved. We propose that he uses a letter-naming strategy to circumvent the disconnection of visual areas from the area of visual word images and that his letter-naming strategy represents a compensatory cross-cuing strategy.     

A comparison of LRT and VOT values between stutterers and nonstutterers

The experiment reported here found no significant group differences in laryngeal reaction time (LRT) and voice onset time (VOT) values. Rank-order correlations between the stutterers' LRT and VOT values were also nonsignificant. A model of the LRT paradigm is presented that (1) allows for systematic assessment of factors possibly contributing to the failure to replicate the often reported LRT group difference, and (2) is useful in examining the relationship between the LRT experimental condition and normal speaking conditions. We argue that two factors were particularly critical to our results. First, simple reaction time procedures included (1) a warning signal that preceded a response signal by a variable 1–3-sec foreperiod, and (2) a single response. We argue that foreperiod durations exceeded the stutterers' speech posture time for a known response. Second, the stuttering severity rating of our experimental group was less severe than ratings in other experiments.     

Event-related potential studies of cerebral specialization during reading: I. Studies of normal adults

A number of methodological features were incorporated in a paradigm designed to maximize the likelihood of finding reliable event-related potential (ERP) signs of functional specializations between and within the cerebral hemispheres. Every subject was more accurate in identifying words presented to the right than to the left visual field. The morphology of the ERPs elicited by these words varied considerably as a function of electrode position both within and between the hemispheres. Amplitude asymmetries of ERP components recorded from occipital regions of the two hemispheres varied systematically with the position of the word in the visual field. On the other hand, ERPs from more anterior (temporal and frontal) regions displayed large asymmetries which were in the same direction regardless of the visual field of word presentation. The most prominent such asymmetry was in the negativity in the region 300–500 msec (N410) which was larger in the left than the right hemisphere in every subject. These results demonstrate that in this paradigm which demands specialized language processing ERPs are sensitive to aspects of cerebral organization both within and between the two hemispheres.     

Is preparation of responses precluded by choice reaction time testing?

Choice reaction times for short (Dit) and long (Dah) Morse key presses were measured using a number of different left hand/right hand Dit/Dah 2-response combinations. When Dit and Dah responses were made with the same hand, Dits were initiated significantly faster, which confirms the finding of Klapp et al. (1974). The absolute sizes of Dit and Dah CRT's, however, varied significantly from one test situation to another; and the Dit:Dah difference was shown to be intransitive. Such context effects cast doubt on the extrapolative power of CRT findings, and on the usefulness of CRT as a measure of movement complexity. Latencies were reduced when subjects knew in advance which hand would be used; but the usefulness of response duration pre-knowledge was not unambiguously demonstrated. Preparation of responses is, therefore, not precluded by CRT testing; and possible explanations for these savings in terms of response selection and motor preprogramming were discussed. On balance, the hypothesis that the longer reaction times of Dah responses are due to their greater movement complexity (Klapp et al. 1974) was rejected, in favour of the explanation that subjects adopt a strategy of preferentially preparing Dit responses.     

Task instructions and strategy transfer in the directed forgetting performance of mentally retarded adolescents

The influence of task explanation on strategy transfer was studied in educable mentally retarded adolescents (13 to 15 years old). A directed forgetting task was used in which the person was required to recall short sequences of picture names. In some sequences there was a cue to forget the first few pictures (irrelevant information) and to remember only the subsequent pictures (relevant information). During the first session the amount of explanation given the directed forgetting task was varied, and during the second, some of the subjects were trained to rehearse in a simple sequential memory task. Transfer of training was then examined on a retest of the directed forgetting task. The majority of subjects trained to rehearse and given a minimal explanation of the directed forgetting task maintained the strategy on trials which were identical to those used during rehearsal training, but failed to generalize the strategy on other trials. The results indicate that providing a full explanation of the task requirements does not assure strategy generalization, but providing only a minimal explanation makes strategy generalization unlikely.     

Piaget's logical formalism for formal operations: An interpretation in context

Two interpretations of the equations used by B. Inhelder and J. Piaget in The growth of logical thinking from childhood to adolescence (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958) are discussed, with implication as the central example. The expression (p ? q) (p implies q) is said to be equal to $\text{(p · q)}\text{V}\text{(}\text{p}\text{· q)}\text{V}\text{(}\text{p}\text{·}\text{q}\text{)}$ (i.e.,p and q, or not p and q, or neither p nor q). According to one, (p ? q) asserts the existence of each case mentioned. According to the other, (p ? q) only asserts that current knowledge allows the possibility of each of the cases. Neither interpretation makes sense of all the relevant passages. Both can be combined in a consistent interpretation when attention is paid to the functional context of the subject's use of logical operations in this book: the “operations” describe the knowledge states which the subject can differentiate and relate, on his way to solving Inhelder's tasks. The logical notation used to represent these states is not a representational format attributed to the subject and manipulated by his cognitive processes, but part of a structuralist account of the subject's reasoning capacities.