Effects of stuttering on fundamental frequency

The purpose of this study was to systematically investigate quantitative fundamental frequency measures prior to moments of stuttering, and relate these measures to the severity and type of stuttering. A repeated readings adaptation procedure was employed to acquire samples of the stuttered and identical fluent speech of stutterers. Thirty-six utterance pairs were classified by type of stuttering (absence of phonation, prolongation, or repetition). A fundamental frequency meter was sampled by a microprocessor computer system at a rate of 256 samples/1.024 sec. Four temporal periods (each 256 msec) preceding the stuttering block were compared with the same periods in a fluently produced sample of similar speech. The analyses revealed differences relative to mean fundamental frequency, variation around the mean fundamental frequency, and the number of voiced data points contained within each temporal segment. The results of this study confirm the existence of acoustic changes in the vocal production of stutterers prior to overt blocks. These changes relate to the type of block that follows. Individual variations that emphasize the need for analyses of within subject differences were found.     

Effects of right hemisphere damage in an adult stutterer

One thesis on stuttering states that stuttering results from hemispheric imbalance of language. Some authors have reported stutterers who ceased stuttering following unilateral neurosurgical procedures, thereby correcting this imbalance. The first case of a stutterer in whom a right hemisphere stroke subsequently developed is reported here. The effects of the stroke on his speech production are discussed.     

Occupational knowledge and career development in adolescence

In an effort to extend our knowledge of career development, two indices of career maturity were investigated in a sample of 6029 high school seniors sampled from 57 Texas public school districts. The study investigated both the degree to which late adolescents choose occupations whose educational requirements match their stated educational goals and the degree to which students' vocational interests are compatible with their occupational choices. The correlations between educational plans and educational requirements of the chosen occupations were .41 or less. Of the subjects who claimed to have at least considerable understanding of their first choice career, only about half planned to achieve the amount of education appropriate to enter that occupation. Subjects' perceptions of how well they understood their occupational choices were also negligibly related to the compatibility of their vocational interests and their career choices. Although educational understanding and interest compatibility both contribute to realism of occupational choices, the correlation between these two indices of career maturity accounted for less than 1% of the variance.     

Organizational communication,performance, and job satisfaction as a function of ethnicity and sex

Regression analysis was used to examine simultaneously the effects of supervisors' and subordinates' ethnicity and sex on organizational communication, supervisory-rated performance, and job satisfaction. The study indicates that female subordinates differentially perceive organizational communication. It also identifies interactions between the sex of the supervisor and subordinate on communication and between the ethnicity of the superior and subordinate on supervisory-rated performance. There were limited impacts of sex and ethnicity on job satisfaction.     

Spatial localization in children after changes in position

Five experiments investigated the young child's ability to retrieve a target after a change in the position of the child or the target. In Experiments I–IV 2- to 4-year-old children were rotated 90, 180, 270, or 360° about a stationary square table containing four identical hiding locations at each of the cardinal locations. The children tested performed this task significantly better than chance, but their errors reflected either their response biases in the absence of any information as to the location of the target, or the repetition of a response which had been successful in retrieving the target prior to the change in position. When the children were forced to respond rapidly, these errors increased significantly. In Experiment V a table top was rotated 90, 180, 270, or 360° in front of 3- to 10-year-old children. There were two cue situations. The child saw the rotation, or the child had to infer the rotation. Young children made errors of the types observed in Experiments I–IV. The ability to inhibit these errors increased with age. By 7 years of age performance was virtually perfect when the child could observe the change in position of the hidden object. The ability to infer the positional change developed more slowly and was good but not perfect at 10 years of age.     

The informativeness and frequency of presentation of a social stimulus as determinants of its efficacy as a reinforcer

It was demonstrated that variations in the informativeness of a social stimulus place important limitations on the generality of the proposition that deprivation heightens, while satiation lowers, responsiveness to a social stimulus. Using 60 children 5 to 6 years of age as subjects, a social stimulus (“good”) was presented at either a high or a low frequency in one of three information-value contexts (high, medium, or low). Immediately following the exposure treatment the same social stimulus was employed as a reinforcer of nonpreferred responses in a two-choice discrimination learning task. The findings indicated that the heightened efficacy of deprivation relative to satiation only held for low information value; when initial information value was high the subsequent efficacy of a social stimulus was enhanced by its initial recurrent usage. Trend analyses revealed that the effects of variations in information value were strongest within the high-frequency-of-praise treatment. Possible mechanisms underlying the significant Information Value × Frequency interaction were discussed.     

Role played self-disclosure as a function of liking and knowing

Subjects identified persons from their own lives whom they liked and knew to varying degrees. At a later session, subjects role-played a self-disclosing conversation with each identified person. Verbal behavior was recorded and analyzed with respect to the personalness of disclosure. Analysis of variance results for both self-report and observational measures show significant effects for liking and knowing on personal, but not impersonal, self-disclosure. The pattern of results over all dependent measures indicates that liking has a more specific effect on personal disclosure than does knowing, but that liking and knowing do not differ in relative control over impersonal disclosure. A correlational analysis involving subjects' perceptions of the experimental situation and the dependent disclosure measures supported this interpretation.     

Varieties of frequency interference in children's recognition of sentence information

The memory of fourth-grade children (9 years, 10 months of age) for information contained in target sentences presented 24 hours earlier was tested by multiple-choice recognition items each consisting of a question about a target sentence followed by three response options. The options consisted of the correct word from the sentence, a new word, and an old, incorrect word that was contained in another sentence on the study trial. The results indicated that the amount of interference produced by old information depended upon the relationship between the sentence in which the old information occurred and the target sentence—being the least when the two were unrelated; the most when the two shared the same subject noun (which also occurred in the stem of the test item for the target sentence); and intermediate when the subjects of the two sentences were synonyms. The interference produced by these manipulations was moderated by instructional strategies and the distance between the target sentence and its variation. The experiment establishes the validity of contextual frequency accrual, a construct logically necessary in extending frequency theory to recognition of information contained in sentences.     

Visual search by children: the effect of background variation and the use of visual cues

A visual search task was used to assess developmental changes in children's selective attention to specified portions of a visual display. Seven-, nine-, and twelve-year-olds searched for a target letter in matrices of letters, each of which was centered in a form. On each matrix the forms were uniform or they varied in color, shape or both color and shape. The children searched with either no cues or with color or shape cues that could be used to restrict and speed their search. In all conditions search speed increased with age. Comparisons among conditions revealed three different age trends. With no cues children of all ages were slowed comparably by variation in background forms. With color cues all children increased their search speeds relative to no-cue speeds, suggesting selective fixation, but the 12-year-olds benefited most from the cues. With shape cues the search speed of 9- and 12-year-olds was slowed while that of 7-year-olds was either unchanged or was slowed only slightly. These different trends caution against overly general statements of changes with age in selective attention, and highlight the need to consider both particular task requirements and the processes used by subjects of different ages in tasks requiring selective attention.