Developmental auditory agnosia in the severely retarded: A further investigation

The hypotheses were investigated that (a) ability to recognize the auditory perceptual stimuli for familiar events is a developmental correlate to language acquisition and (b) the low functioning mentally handicapped suffer from auditory agnosia and are impaired in this ability. The subjects were 42 nonretarded children of ages 3 through 6 and 53 severely and moderately retarded, noninstitutionalized students. The retarded subjects were matched by mental age to the chronological age of the nonretarded children. The stimuli were 49 environmental sounds; the task consisted of sound-and-picture matching-to-sample. Group membership and developmental age were the factors in an analysis of variance design. The results revealed a strong effect of developmental age (p <. 0001). The effect of group was not significant, indicating that auditory agnosia may not be common among the lower functioning retarded. The assumption that agnosia may be a major factor underlying the language disability of the severely retarded was reexamined. It was suggested that the severely retarded achieve the requisite perceptual-semantic knowledge base for language too late, after the critical age for spontaneous and efficient language learning has passed.     

Auditory processing of brain-damaged adults under competitive listening conditions

Right CVAs, mild left CVAs, and non-brain-damaged adults received the Token Test under three conditions: quiet, white noise, and speech babble. Left CVAs performed most poorly of all groups in all conditions experiencing difficulty with subtests III, IV, and V. Right CVAs were inferior to controls on each of these three subtests in the speech babble condition only. Thus, right CVA difficulty with both memory and syntactic tasks was demonstrated in speech babble. These results are explained by the hypothesis that both hemispheres are necessary to process auditory information under complex listening conditions. Total brain capacity of right CVA patients may be overloaded if either memory load or linguistic complexity is increased in the presence of certain types of listening competition.     

Individual and organizational correlates of promotion refusal

Individual and organizational correlates of employees who refuse seniority-based promotions in union lines of progression are examined. The sample consisted of 313 production employees of a large manufacturing complex. Correlational and discriminant analyses revealed that age, being female, and number of employees in the department related positively to promotion refusal, while years of education and pay showed a negative relationship. Of these variables, years of education was the strongest predictor. Potential explanations for the results relate to stress avoidance, perceived inabilities, and equity theory. Areas for future research are suggested.     

Sensitivity of 5- and 7-month-old infants to pictorial depth information

An Ames (1951, Psychological Monographs, 65(1, Whole No. 324)) static trapezoidal window, under monocular view, was used to test young infants' responsiveness to pictorial depth. When adults view this display monocularly with the smaller side of the window rotated toward them, they report that the orientation of the display becomes ambiguous: When the head is moved, the window may appear to be in the fronto-parallel plane or either side may appear closer. The 7-month-olds we tested appeared to experience a similar ambiguity; they reached to the near side of the rotated trapezoidal window with significantly less consistency or directedness than infants in a control group tested with a rotated object that lacked pictorial depth information. When 5-month-olds were tested, however, they reached with equal consistency to the closer side of the trapezoidal window and of the control display, apparently uninfluenced by the pictorial depth information available in the trapezoidal window. Thus, sensitivity to the pictorial information for depth that is present in the trapezoidal window appears to develop after the age of 22 weeks.     

Syntactic influences on stuttering in young child stutterers

This study examined the location and rate of stuttering in the spontaneous speech of nine young stutterers (4.0–6.6 yr) in relation to certain aspects of syntax. It was designed to answer the following questions: Is there more stuttering at clause onset (boundary) than at other points in the clause? Does the type of clause influence rate of stuttering? Is there more stuttering on complex than on simple sentences? The syntactic analysis defined 10 clause types (seven pertaining to complex sentences and three pertaining to simple sentences); clause boundaries (taking into account “filler” words occuring in such positions); and hierarchical constituent structure within sentences. Stuttering was found with significantly greater frequency at clause boundaries than at internal (nonboundary) positions of clauses. This was apparent for nine of the 10 clause types, the exception being complement clauses. The word “and” at the beginning of simple and complex sentences provoked a high rate of stuttering. The hierarchical structure within the clause did not influence the location of stuttering, and sentence complexity was not a factor in the rate of stuttering.     

Concurrent validity of the WISC-R factor scores

This study investigated the efficacy of predicting academic achievement as measured by the Wide Range Achievement Test using the factor scores of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised as potential predictors. Both instruments were administered to 200 school children referred for psychological evaluations. Factor scores for the WISC-R were computed according to equations provided by Gutkin (1978). These factor scores then were regressed in a stepwise manner on the Reading, Spelling, and Arithmetic standard scores from the Wide Range Achievement Test. Stepwise regressions also were performed using the traditional Verbal and Performance IQs as the potential predictors. A comparison was made between the results obtained by use of the factors or the more common scores. The results indicated that the Freedom From Distractibility factor score significantly aided in the prediction of Reading and Spelling achievement and was of primary importance in predicting Arithmetic achievement. When the stepwise results using the different scores were contrasted, the factor scores accounted for appreaciably more variance in Arithmetic than did the traditional Verbal and Performance IQs. Derived regression equations are reported along with a discussion of the interpretability of the Freedom From Distractibility factor.     

Context, categorization, and recall: The “change-of-standard” effect

A psycholinguistically based conception of the relation among context, categorization, and memory is tested by examining what happens to people's memory of an object when the object is initially categorized in terms of the context in which it appears, but, when the object is later recalled, this context is no longer salient. Subjects read about the sentencing decisions of a target trial judge in the context of other trial judges who consistently gave either higher sentences or lower sentences than the target judge. As predicted, subjects tended to categorize the target judge as “lenient” in the former, harsh context condition, and as “harsh” in the latter, lenient context condition. A week later, subjects read about the sentencing decisions of some additional judges, and then recalled the sentencing decisions of the target judge they had read about the week before. Across the two sessions, either a harsh, moderate, or lenient category norm for judges' sentencing decisions was established by having subjects read about decisions that involved either high, medium, or low sentences, respectively. The results indicated that subjects recalled the target judge's decisions by interpreting their prior categorization of his behavior in terms of the category norm established across the two sessions rather than the original context. Thus, subjects who were exposed to the same target in the same circumstances, and initially categorized the target in the same way, nevertheless remembered his behavior differently if their category norm was different at the moment of recall. Other types of “change of standard” and their implications for human judgment and memory are discussed.