An awareness approach to the covert symptoms of stuttering

Speech-language clinicians working with the confirmed stuttering client are often faced with the clinical management of the covert symptoms of stuttering in addition to the more observable and measurable overt symptoms. The authors report the successful use of awareness techniques to exaggerate the subjective experience of these covert symptoms and encourage the use of these techniques as an adjunct to the counseling and desensitization procedures traditionally employed. A transcribed clinical management session in which several awareness techniques are used to aid the client in an introspective examination of “anticipation of stuttering,” is analyzed in order to reach some specific recommendations for using awareness techniques in the clinical management of the covert symptoms of stuttering.     

Programmed stuttering therapy for children: Comparison of four establishment programs

Four different establishment programs (programmed traditional, delayed auditory feedback, pause, and gradual increase in length and complexity of utterance) for improving the fluency of school-age children who stutter were compared. The programs were carried out by eight public school clinicians with 16 children (eight elementary and eight junior-senior high school) in their respective schools. All four programs produced important improvement in the speech fluency of the 16 children. All the children demonstrated transfer of fluency to extratraining settings. The delayed auditory feedback program required the least therapy hours, but it was difficult for the clinicians to operate correctly. The gradual increase in length and complexity of utterance programs produced the best overall results. The transfer and maintenance programs provided for additional generalization and permanency of fluency. Follow-up revealed that the children continued their increased level of fluency.     

The ecological approach to perceiving as a foundation for understanding the development of knowing in infancy

The ecological thesis of direct realism is used as a framework for examining the development of knowing in human infancy. When information for perceiving is defined ecologically (i.e., relative to the situational context and to the physical dimensions, capabilities, and needs of the perceiver), knowing need not be construed as the act of using representations to give meaning to acts or percepts. Knowing, alternatively, is the act of noticing affordances, situation and perceiverspecific meanings of objects, according to their value to the perceiver for achieving specific goals. Changes with development in infant sensorimotor functioning may, in this view, be explained by a process of increasing economy in noticing potentially available affordances, rather than a process of constructing a representational system for making present something not present. Studies of three infant skills widely attributed to the onset of representation are examined with regard to this ecological thesis. Results indicate that the noticing of affordances is critically involved in each of these skills.     

Symbol complexity and symbol identification with rotated symbols

Previous studies of the identification of rotated symbols have been restricted to either alphanumeric characters or symbols designed to be similar in complexity and type to alphanumerics. These researches have found identification response times to be independent of the magnitude of a symbol's angular displacement from a standard upright position, such findings being typically interpreted as supporting a feature extraction model of identification. In the present experiment complex Japanese characters were used to assess whether such a feature extraction interpretation could be generalized to identifying complex rotated symbols. Identification response times were also found to be constant across all non-standard orientations of the characters, supporting a feature extraction interpretation, but quicker times for standard cases suggested that some qualifications might be necessary.     

Fluid and crystallized intelligence and primacy/recency components of short-term memory

Primacy and recency recall measures, obtained from both free and probed-recall tasks, were included in a battery of tests which also contained markers for fluid intelligence, crystallized intelligence, and cognitive speed factors. Our results confirmed previous findings that for subjects within the normal range of abilities, recency recall from probed-recall tasks is more closely linked to intelligence than is primacy recall. A new finding was also obtained: that primacy recall is correlated more with measures of cognitive speed than is recency recall. These results are discussed in terms of the concept of working memory and its relation to intelligence.     

Voice-onset time as a clue to the nature of Broca speech errors

Blumstein, Cooper, Goodglass, Statlender, and Gottleib (Brain and Language, 9, 153–170 (1980)) attempt to determine by an examination of the VOTs of aphasic speakers whether Broca's aphasics make phonemic substitutions in addition to their well-known phonetic errors. There are a number of problems with this study, mostly due to an apparent failure to fully appreciate the fact that VOT is a cover term for several acoustic features. It is suggested that VOT measurement in any given position in a word cannot solve this problem and that future studies should include glottographic observations as well as VOT measurements made in all positions in the word.     

The time course of extinction-induced aggressive behavior in humans: Evidence for a stage model of extinction

Three experiments examined the effects of extinction on aggressive responding in male college students. In Experiment 1 subjects initially performed on a task where shuttle responding was either continuously or partially reinforced with tokens while either a nonaggressive button-pressing response or an aggressive pad-striking response was concurrently reinforced by escape from a moderately aversive tone. During shuttle acquisition there was clear preference for the escape response of button pressing, but when shuttle responding was extinguished subjects began to respond aggressively by striking the pad to escape. The time course of aggressive escape responses during concurrent shuttle extinction was an inverted U; aggressive responding rose to a peak and then declined. Aggressive responding began earlier in extinction following continuous- as contrasted with partial-reinforcement shuttle training. Experiment 2 showed that similar extinction-induced aggression was precipitated by both moderate and extended continuous-reinforcement shuttle training, with earlier onset after extended reinforcement. Experiment 3 ruled out the possibility that the emergence of the pad-striking response during extinction was simply induced response variation. These data were interpreted within the theoretical framework of P.T.P. Wong's recently advanced stage model of extinction (Animal Learning and Behavior, 1978,6, 82–93).     

Within-compound associations between the context and the conditioned stimulus

Three experiments were conducted to test for the presence of associations between contextual cues and the nominal conditioned stimulus (CS) in fear conditioning. Rats were given tone-footshock pairings and were tested for their fear of the nominal CS, the tone, in a different context. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that rats given nonreinforced exposure to the training context following conditioning were less fearful of the CS. Experiment 3 indicated that additional footshock presentations in the training context following conditioning produced greater fear of the CS. In both procedures postconditioning treatments designed to directly alter only the associative strength of the training context yielded parallel changes in the conditioned response to the CS. These data suggest that within-compound associations are formed between the context and the CS during classical conditioning.     

Lithium-mediated disruptions of latent inhibition: Overshadowing by the unconditioned stimulus in flavor conditioning

In a series of experiments, the ability of a single lithium preexposure to disrupt CS effectiveness was assessed using a latent inhibition procedure. Lithium preexposure administered proximal (90 min) to a saccharin familiarization trial reduced latent inhibition whereas a similar administration more distal (360 min) to flavor familiarization failed to do so. Additional experiments demonstrated that this socalled “US overshadowing” effect was not attributable to sensitization (Experiment 2), excitatory backward conditioning (Experiment 3), or state dependency (Experiment 4). The implications of US overshadowing for proximal US-preexposure effects are discussed.