Bilateral tachistoscopic word perception of stutterers and normal subjects

Bilateral tachistoscopic procedures were utilized to investigate the visual half-field preferences of 15 stutterers and a group of 15 normal controls. Statistical analyses indicated a right visual half-field preference for the control group. In contrast, a significant visual half-field preference was not revealed for the stuttering group. However, further analysis revealed that a significantly larger proportion of stutterers, compared to controls, demonstrated a left visual half-field preference. Results indicated reversed cerebral processing for the stuttering group as compared with the control group.     

From dispositions to behaviors: The flip side of attribution

The implicational relations between dispositional levels and relevant categories of behavior were investigated. Observers were asked questions about the extent to which persons occupying moderate or extreme positions on an attribute (dispositional) continuum (a) attempt various behaviors, (b) are potentially able to perform various behaviors, and (c) generally emit those same behaviors. Three determinants—central tendency, ability, and social desirabliity—offer a reasonable account of the observed implicational relations. First, persons with a given disposition are not expected to emit behavior that is widely discrepant with that disposition. Second, ability considerations dictate that persons with skillful dispositions are believed capable of unskillful behavior, but unskillful persons are thought relatively incapable of skillful behavior. Third, persons are believed to more frequently attempt socially desirable than socially undesirable behavior. Also, persons with moderate dispositions are believed to actually emit socially desirable behavior more frequently than socially undesirable behavior. Finally, the determinants noted above may be of differing relevance for morality, ability, and preference attributes.     

Olfactory dysfunction in man: anatomical and behavioral aspects

We reviewed studies examining the olfaction of patients with brain damage for the purpose of discerning correlations between disordered structure and function. Patient samples included those with neurological disorders and neurosurgical interventions and recording of spontaneous or elicited neuronal activity. Brain areas involved in olfaction include the olfactory bulbs, the orbitofrontal and medial temporal cortices, the thalamus, and the amygdala. Despite recent advances in olfactory anatomy, understanding of how these structures are related to olfactory detection, discrimination, and recognition continues to be limited. Inadequate localization of brain lesions and lack of comprehensive behavioral assessment have thus far prevented a detailed account of the organization of olfaction in the human brain.     

CT scan and neuropsychological correlates of Alzheimer's disease and Huntington's disease

"Cortical" and "subcortical" dementia syndromes differ in areas of primary neuropathology and clinical characteristics. Conventional CT scan interpretation, visual inspection of pictures, has not been useful in studying dementia. Recent studies of the digitally stored CT attenuation values have found systematic variations with normal aging and aphasia subtypes. In this study of numerical CT scan information in four Alzheimer's Disease and two Huntington's Disease patients, a double dissociation of frontal and temporal lobe density values was found, and a significant correlation was found between left temporal lobe density and verbal ability measures in the Alzheimer's Disease patients.     

Teaching autistic children to use extra-stimulus prompts

Autistic children often do not transfer from extra-stimulus prompts, and thus do not utilize a frequent learning aid. It has been hypothesized that this is due to stimulus overselectivity; a failure to respond to simultaneous multiple cues. This study was designed to determine if autistic children who initially respond only to single cues can be taught a set to respond to two cues and subsequently utilize an extra-stimulus (pointing) prompt. Four autistic children were pretested to determine if they could learn a complex visual discrimination by either trial and error or an extra-stimulus prompt fading procedure. Since they did not, the children were then taught to respond to two cues through a multiple-cue training procedure and subsequently tested to determine if they could now utilize a pointing prompt. Results indicated that while all four children initially did not transfer from an extra-stimulus (pointing) prompt, they did so subsequent to multiple-cue training. The results are discussed in terms of implications for treatment (remediating overselectivity) and in relation to normal child development.     

Orienting versus learning instructions in children's free recall: New evidence

Ninety-six first graders were given a list of either words or pictures to process under three types of incidental orienting instructions (semantic, directed at list organization; semantic, directed at individual item characteristics; and physical) and an intentional-learning instruction. For pictures and words, list organizational instructions were the most effective, and were superior to intentional-learning instructions. In contrast, individual item-orienting instructions were not better than intentional-learning instructions on either list. Additionally, different patterns of instructional effects emerged on the two list types, which were interpreted with respect to both available data and contemporary processing theories.     

Functional constraints on sentence processing: A cross-linguistic study

English and Italian provide some interesting contrasts that are relevant to a controversial problem in psycholinguistics: the boundary between grammatical and extra-grammatical knowledge in sentence processing. Although both are SVO word order languages without case inflections to indicate basic grammatical relations, Italian permits far more variation in word order for pragmatic purposes. Hence Italians must rely more than English listeners on factors other than word order. In this experiment, Italian and English adults were asked to interpret 81 simple sentences varying word order, animacy contrasts between the two nouns, topicalization and contrastive stress. Italians relied primarily on semantic strategies while the English listeners relied on word order—including a tendency to interpret the second noun as subject in non-canonical word orders (corresponding to word order variations in informal English production). Italians also made greater use of topic and stress information. Finally, Italians were much slower and less consistent in the application of word order strategies even for reversible NVN sentences where there was no conflict between order and semantics. This suggests that Italian is ‘less’ of an SVO language than English. Semantic strategies apparently stand at the ‘core’ of Italian to the same extent that word order stands at the ‘core’ of English. It is suggested that these results pose problems for claims about a ‘universal’ separation between semantics and syntax, and for theories that postulate a ‘universal’ priority of one type of information over another. Results are discussed in the light of the competition model, a functionalist approach to grammar that accounts in a principled way for probabilistic outcomes and differential ‘weights’ among competing and converging sources of information in sentence processing.     

Communicative gestures of the hand and arm when 4-year-old sons and their mothers interact

This study investigated a wide range of communicative hand/arm gestures of 4-year-old males when interacting with their mothers. The types of gesture categories observed were in keeping with the predicted encoding ability of this aged child. Pantomimic and deictic gestures were observed in significantly greater numbers than semantic modifying and relational gestures. Although it was found that the mothers' gestural usage reflected the type of gesture categories seen in the children's group, no correlation was found between gesture usage of individual mother-child pairs.     

Vocal changes in stutterers and nonstutterers during monotoned speech

For years, reports have circulated that stutterers experience marked decrements in their stuttering when they speak or read in monotone. Wingate has suggested that the ameliorative effects of various novel speaking conditions on stuttering can be attributed to modifications in vocalization induced by such conditions. The present study was conducted to see whether this explanation would extend to monotoned speech as well. Ten teenage and adult stutterers and 10 normal speakers were tested in control and monotone reading conditions. Dependent measures were the frequencies of disfluency and stuttering, fundamental frequency, fundamental frequency standard deviation, vocal SPL, vocal SPL standard deviation, and fluent reading rate. Only within-group statistical comparisons were made, because members of the two groups could not be matched pairwise along critical vocal parameters. The major findings of this study indicated that across the two conditions, both groups significantly reduced their fundamental frequency, fundamental frequency standard deviation, vocal SPL and vocal SPL standard deviation. Only the stutterers exhibited a significant decrement in disfluency and stuttering. The normals did not evince enough disfluency in the control condition for a reduction to occur during monotoning. Neither group effected a reduction in fluent reading rates. These and other findings and interpretations are discussed relative to Wingate's modified vocalization hypothesis.