Primary-school stutterers: Have attitudes changed?

How concerned are primary-school-aged stuttering children about their communication problem? What are the clinical implications of this concern?Fifteen years ago, Silverman (1970) suggested that primary-school-aged children who stuttered were not concerned about their disfluencies. A clinical implication of that report was that the interpreted lack of concern might negatively affect the children's motivation and desire for change in therapy. Scant research exists to support or refute this implication. While research is available on reactions to stuttering, pretherapeutic attitudes—especially those of children—have not been systematically reported. Guitar (1976) measured the pre-treatment attitudes of 38 adult stutterers and reported that, “those stutterers with more negative attitudes measured just prior to treatment, were most likely to have high levels of stuttering a year later, even though all subjects left therapy entirely fluent.” In related areas, research by Kolb, Winter, and Berlen (1968), McFall (1970), and McFall and Hammen (1971) has indicated that clients who are more motivated do better in behavior modification programs.Whether or not these findings may be generalized to children, in the midst of a developmental process, is purely speculative.     

Deep dyslexia in childhood?

Deep dyslexia is an acquired reading disorder in which semantic substitutions (e.g., city read as town) are made in reading single isolated words. In this paper, evidence for deep dyslexic-type errors is presented from the word-recognition responses of six children, aged 7 years and 0 month to 8 years and 9 months, with severe reading disorders. These semantic substitutions occur in the absence of phonological skills. Therefore, it appears that there exists a small subset of developmental dyslexics who at the beginning of acquisition of reading skills are able to engage in semantic processing, but who show severe impairment of phonological processing. The existence of these reading errors indicate that the use of a phonological code is not necessary to extract meaning from the printed word.     

On the Bradley hypothesis concerning agrammatism: the nonword-interference effect

In 1980, D. C. Bradley, M. F. Garrett, and E. B. Zurif (in D. Caplan (Ed.), Biological studies of mental processes, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) have proposed a lexical hypothesis on agrammatism. The theoretical background of this hypothesis is described. Then two experiments are reported with normal speakers on the so-called nonword-interference effect that has been one of the two major sources of experimental evidence for this hypothesis. The first experiment replicates the original finding that the interference effect is found when the nonword starts with a content word but not when it starts with a function word. In the second experiment, it is shown that this contrast is due to an artifact of the composition of the word list. When this list contains both content and function words, rather than only content words--as in Bradley's experiments and our Experiment I--both content and function nonwords show an equally sized interference effect. The consequences for the lexical hypothesis are discussed.     

Treatment of chronic global aphasia with a nonverbal communication system

Four chronic global aphasics were treated with Blissymbols (C. K. Bliss, 1965, Semantography-Blissymbolics, Sydney: Semantography Pub.). As soon as possible the therapeutic communication was based solely on the use of the symbols. Three patients seemed to benefit from therapy. In one case therapy had to be discontinued because of massive perseveration. In one patient expression of needs relied solely on the use of the symbols. In another, expressive speech could be restored to such an extent that communication by the use of symbols was discontinued.     

The word-superiority effect under conditions that approximate reading

Observers detected a briefly flashed target letter embedded in word, pronounceable nonword, and unpronounceable nonword contexts. The word context facilitated perception under both holistic and analytical processing strategies; the facilitative effect was enhanced when processing was analytical.     

Different methods of lexical access for words presented in the left and right visual hemifields

Right-handed adults were asked to identify by name bilaterally presented words and pronounceable nonwords. For words in the normal horizontal format, word length (number of letters) affected left visual hemifield (LVF) but not right visual hemifield (RVF) performance in Experiments 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6. This finding was made for words of high and low frequency (Experiment 6) and imageability (Experiment 5). It also held across markedly different levels of overall performance (Experiments 1 and 2), and across different relative positionings of short and long words in the LVF and RVF (Experiment 3). Experiment 4 demonstrated that the variable affecting LVF performance is the number of letters in a word, not its phonological length. For pronounceable nonwords (Experiment 7) and words in unusual formats (Experiment 8), however, length affected both LVF and RVF performance. The characteristics identified for RVF performance in these experiments also hold for the normal reading system. In this (normal) system the absence of length effects for horizontally formatted words is generally taken to reflect the processes involved in lexical access. Length effects in the normal reading system are thought to arise when lexical access for unusually formatted words and for the pronunciation of nonwords requires the short-term storage of information at a graphemic level of analysis. The characteristics of LVF performance indicate that horizontally formatted words presented to the right cerebral hemisphere can only achieve lexical access by a method that requires the short-term storage of graphemic information. This qualitative difference in methods of lexical access applies regardless of whether the right hemisphere is seen as accessing words in the left hemisphere's lexicon or words in a lexicon of its own.     

Vowel duration in stutterers participating in precision fluency shaping

The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which stutters manipulate vowel duration to achieve fluency after participating in Precision Fluency Shaping. Nine stutterers who read an all-voiced sentence fluently before and after therapy were selected for study. Wide-band spectrograms were made of the initial phrase of the sentences, and vowel durations were computed. Results indicated that extended vowel durations were characteristic of the fluency of stutterers posttherapy. The subject that had the highest rate of disfluency after therapy also had the shortest vowel durations. Clinical implications concerning the importance of speech rate during carryover practice are made.     

Group differences in intelligence and speed of information-processing

Three samples of different levels of mental ability, but each of average or above- average intelligence, were administered a battery of reaction time test which measure the speed with which persons can execute various elementary cognitive processes. Discriminant analyses revealed significant differences between the groups in reaction times and intraindividual standard deviations, and univariate analyses indicated that higher ability groups tended to obtain significantly faster mean reaction times and to show significantly less intraindividual variability than lower ability groups. Groups which differed the most in mental ability differed to the greatest extent on the more complex reaction time tests but this pattern was reversed for groups which were relatively close in mean IQ. Generally, the results support the hypothesis that speed- of-processing is an important factor unferlying intelligence, but a number of puzzling findings indicate the need for continued research in this area.