Syntactic determinants of stuttering in the spontaneous speech of normally fluent and stuttering children

Conflicting findings have been reported concerning whether fluent children use more complex syntactic structures than stutterers and whether or not stutterers experience specific difficulty with complex syntactic structures. On critical examination, the first of these apparent discrepancies appears to be due to (a) differences in the methods employed for syntactic analysis in different studies, and (b) misleading impressions gained by looking at speakers within a single age range. Data were reanalyzed where one method of analysis had shown that fluent speakers and stutterers did not differ with regard to syntactic structures used but where they did show a propensity for stuttering to occur on complex syntactic structures. These data cover a range of age groups. When the second method of syntactic analysis was applied, a difference was found between fluent speakers and stutterers, with the stutterers initially using more simple structures and fewer complex ones. This difference decreased over age groups. However, a difference still remained with respect to which syntactic structures stutterers experience difficulty. An additional analysis, not formerly conducted on these data, showed that, as reported elsewhere, there was a higher probability of stuttering on clause-initial and. It was also shown that this tendency decreased with age group of the stutterers.     

Eye movements reveal no immediate "WOW" ("which one's weird") effect in autism spectrum disorder

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typically developed (TD) adult participants viewed pairs of scenes for a simple "spot the difference" (STD) and a complex "which one's weird" (WOW) task. There were no group differences in the STD task. In the WOW task, the ASD group took longer to respond manually and to begin fixating the target "weird" region. Additionally, as indexed by the first-fixation duration into the target region, the ASD group failed to "pick up" immediately on what was "weird". The findings are discussed with reference to the complex information processing theory of ASD (Minshew & Goldstein, 1998 ).     

The relationships of change in work climate with changes in burnout and depression: a 2-year longitudinal study of Chinese mental health care workers

Mental health care workers face heavy emotional demand and are prone to work burnout. Work burnout has been associated with poor mental health and work climate, which refers to individual perceptions about work setting. The purpose of this study was to examine whether intra-individual changes in work climate were associated with intra-individual changes in burnout and depression over two years. The present sample included Chinese mental health care workers (N = 312; mean age = 38.6, SD = 9.9) working in a psychosocial rehabilitation institution. The participants completed questionnaires on work climate, work burnout and depression at seven time points across two years. Parallel process latent growth modeling was used to analyze the associations of change between work climate and burnout and depression. Work climate displayed a logarithmic decreasing trend while burnout and depression displayed logarithmic increasing trends over two years. Baseline levels of work climate were negatively and moderately associated with baseline levels of burnout and depression (r = ?.44 to ?.60, p < .01). Changes in work climate were negatively and moderately associated with change in burnout (r = ?.43, p < .01) and change in depression (r = ?.31, p < .05). Change in burnout was positively and strongly associated (r = .58, p < .01) with change in depression. The current results support temporal relationships among changes in work climate, burnout and depression across time. Practical implications for future preventive work in burnout interventions were discussed within this population.     

An Online Investigation of Imagery to Attenuate Paranoia in College Students

Onset of psychosis typically occurs in young adulthood, and is likely to be preceded by anxiety, low mood, suspiciousness and perceptual anomalies. Where these develop into mild or brief psychotic experience, and impact on functioning, young people are identified as being at risk of psychosis. Early intervention may reduce severity or delay transition to psychosis, and yield significant healthcare cost savings. This study examined the impact of an online attachment-based imagery task on paranoia, anxiety, mood and self-esteem, in college students. An experimental design was used to compare the effects of secure and anxious-ambivalent attachment imagery. A total of 301 college students, aged 18–48 years (M?=?20.1, SD?=?2.976), were randomly assigned to one of the two imagery conditions, and assessed pre and post imagery task on standardised measures of paranoia, anxiety, mood and self-esteem. A series of mixed model analyses of variance showed that participants in the secure attachment imagery condition reported lower levels of paranoia, anxiety and negative mood, and higher levels of positive mood and self-esteem, compared with those in the anxious-ambivalent attachment imagery condition. The study is limited by the lack of a neutral control condition and follow-up measures. Nevertheless, study demonstrated the impact of attachment-based imagery on paranoia. If these effects are replicated with ‘at risk mental state’ groups, and maintained at follow-up, online imagery may provide a safe and highly accessible means of attenuating paranoia in young people at risk of developing psychosis.     

INTERNAL STRUCTURE OF CONTENT WORDS LEADING TO LIFESPAN DIFFERENCES IN PHONOLOGICAL DIFFICULTY IN STUTTERING

This study investigated whether frequency of stuttering was affected by factors that specify the phonological difficulty of a sound and whether and how any influences vary across age groups. Analyses were performed separately on content words and function words. The phonological factors examined were: a) Whether the word contained a late emerging consonant (LEC); and b) Whether the word contained a consonant string (CS). Analyses showed that these factors occurred at different rates across the age groups used (children under 12, teenagers between 12 and 18, and adults). A more detailed breakdown was also reported of frequency of usage of LEC and CS over age groups depending on whether and where these factors occurred in the content words; all nine combinations of no LEC, word-initial LEC, non-initial LEC with no CS, word-initial CS, and non-initial CS were examined. Usage of certain of these nine categories varied over age groups. Friedman statistic on the ratio of stuttering (proportion of stuttered words in a particular word class divided by the proportion of words in that particular word class) showed that the frequency of stuttering remained high for adult speakers when CS and LEC both occurred in a word and when they appeared in word-initial position. These findings support a recently proposed theory that accounts for life-span changes in stuttering.     

The association between stuttering, Brown''s factors, and phonological categories in child stutterers ranging in age between 2 and 12 years

Though the phonological difficulty of a word might reasonably be supposed to influence whether a word is stuttered, it has recently been reported that the incidence of stuttering does not depend on this factor in child stutterers. This conclusion is reexamined in the current report. Data are employed that were obtained from groups of child stutterers (and their controls) who vary in age and severity of their disorder. First, it is shown that the measure of phonological difficulty reveals differences in phonological ability for children of different ages (stutterers and fluent controls). The properties of words with regard to whether they are function words or content words, their position in the sentence, their length, and the phoneme that they start with vary between phonological categories (referred to as “Brown's factors”). Since these factors could influence whether words are stuttered in their own right, they may led to apparent differences in stuttering between words in different phonological categories that are spurious. Alternatively, these factors may disguise influences that phonological categories have on stuttering. It is shown in the next analysis that the words in the various phonological categories differ with regard to Brown's factors. In the final analysis, the proportion of words stuttered for words in each phonological category are analyzed so that any influence Brown's factors might have are removed by treating the factors as covariates. No dependence of stuttering on phonological category is observed for age group, stutterer's severity, or word types (stuttered word or word following the stuttered word). Thus, phonological difficulty as measured here and elsewhere does not appear to be a major factor governing the incidence of stuttering in children.