Electromyographic indications of laryngeal-area activity during stuttering expectancy

Using surface electrodes, mean microvolt values of laryngeal-area muscle activity were determined for 13 male and 6 female stutterers during 10-sec periods in which single words were silently read and stuttering expectancy was indicated. No significant differences in levels of laryngeal-area muscle activity were found between periods of fluency expectancy and stuttering expectancy preceding both fluent and stuttered speech. The results were interpreted as being nonsupportive of the hypothesis that a breakdown in stutterers' laryngeal-area muscle activity occurs during moments of stuttering expectancy. In addition, the results suggest that the most common rationale for the utilization of laryngeal biofeedback procedures to enhance fluency should be questioned.     

The effects of individual differences in test anxiety and type of orienting task on levels of organization in free recall

In Experiment 1, high and low test-anxious subjects recalled a list composed of words that could be organized either by taxonomic categories or first letters. High-anxiety subjects showed less recall and conceptual clustering. There was no anxiety difference in alphabetic clustering, but low-anxiety subjects used alphabetic clusters to bridge transitions between conceptual categories more often than did high-anxiety subjects. An initial orienting task which required semantic processing reduced the recall deficit for high-anxiety subjects but not the clustering deficit. Low-anxiety subjects seemed minimally affected by a nonsemantic-orienting task. Experiment 2 used a list that could be organized by associates or rhymes. High-anxiety subjects recalled less and exhibited less clustering of both types. The nonsemantic-orienting task depressed performance for both anxiety levels, though the effect was somewhat greater for high-anxiety subjects. Overall, these results provide little evidence to support the hypothesis that high-anxiety subjects process differently only for semantic content, but methodological limitations preclude unequivocally rejecting that view.     

Communicative stress and stuttering frequency during normal,whispered, and articulation-without-phonation speech modes

The effect of communicative stress on the frequency of stuttered syllables in 12 adult stutterers reading six different but equivalent passages using normal voicing, whispering, and articulation-without-phonation speech under a stress and a non-stress condition was studied. Although the frequency of stuttering was significantly greater in the normal voicing mode than in the whispering mode and greater in the whispering mode than in the articulation-without-phonation mode, no differences were found between the stress and the nonstress conditions with respect to stuttering.     

Neuropsychological significance of phonetically accurate and phonetically inaccurate spelling errors in younger and older retarded spellers

The performances of two groups of retarded spellers (who were equated with respect to the level of deficient performance in spelling, but who differed in the level of phonetic accuracy of their misspellings) at two different age levels were compared to those of normal spellers who had been matched for age and WISC Performance IQ with the retarded spelling groups. The results indicated very marked differences in a number of linguistic skills between the normal spellers and the retarded spellers whose misspellings were characterized by phonetic inaccuracy. The performances of the retarded spellers who produced a preponderance of phonetically accurate misspellings differed markedly from those of the normal spellers only when the task demands involved fairly complex linguistic-cognitive operations. For the most part, the differences among the three groups were in evidence only at the older age level studied.     

The universal nature of human intelligence: Evidence from games

Mentally retarded individuals have relatively greater difficulty in dealing with strategic games and puzzles than with many other tasks. Consequently, it is of interest to find that strategic games have been played since ancient times, are played throughout the world, and that players who excel are frequently considered wise. Hidden within the more obvious differences between cultures, strategic games are an invariant expression of certain universal intellectual traits.     

The neurotic paradox and self-punitive behavior in humans

Human subjects learned a key-pressing response in order to avoid or escape shock. The reinforcement contingencies were then changed to punishment or to regular nonpunished extinction. The locus of shock onset and offset was systematically varied during the punishment phase. More subjects reported awarencess of the change in the nonpunished extinction group. By inference, the punished groups responded more, and thus the results appear analogous to animal studies on vicious circle, self-punitive responding. Discriminability of change from acquisition to extinction appeared to affect detection of the change.     

Parameters for vowel substitutions in Broca''s aphasia

Most phonological investigations of aphasic speech have focused on consonants. In this study, the vowel substitutions of five English-speaking Broca's aphasics were investigated with respect to several major explanatory hypotheses. An important possible motivating factor for aphasic substitutions, phonological environment, is an unlikely origin for these errors, since most substitutions occur along the paradigmatic axis. Another prominent hypothesis, markedness, also has no predictive power for the data of this sample. However, an analysis of the five Chomsky and Halle (1968, (The Sound Pattern of English), New York: Harper and Row) vowel features indicates that the two features for vowel height are selectively impaired: There is a strong tendency for lower vowels to replace higher targets. Moreover, the substitution sounds tend to be close to their target sounds along the height axis. Four possible hypotheses are advanced to account for this consistent lowering tendency.     

Field articulation and working memory

This experiment assessed the proposal that performance differences associated with field independence/field articulation reflect differential efficiency in the use of a limited capacity information-processing system termed working memory. Extreme scores on a group-administered version of the embedded figures test were used to identify subjects “high” and “low” in degree of field articulation. The task required that a subject retain a series of digits for subsequent report while performing a semantic modification of a target phrase. Concurrent information load on working memory was varied in two ways: by increasing memory load from 3 to 6 digits, and by increasing the complexity of the semantic processing required. In low information load conditions no differences were found between high FA and low FA groups. In high information load conditions low FA subjects made more errors in digit recall and took longer to perform the difficult semantic modification.     

Sensory modality and method of item information presentation in memory

Investigated were differences in paired-associate learning for auditory versus visual modalities and within each modality the anticipation and study test methods of item presentation were compared. Extant reports re these two sensory modalities and of the two learning methods had been inconsistent. In this study of 40 university students, the learning of CVC-CVC nonsense syllable pairs was significantly better with the visual than with the auditory modality. The study-test method was significantly superior to the anticipation method in the visual mode. With auditory presentations, however, acquisition levels for both methods were the same. Significant interactions were observed between sensory modalities and methods of presentation. At present the retention interval theory (Izawa 1972–1979b) appears to account best for the varied findings with respect to the two methods of presentation.