Speech and bimanual hand organization in adult stutterers and nonstutterers

A multivariate approach was used to investigate the relationship between speech fluency and bimanual handwriting in right-handed male stutterers and nonstutterers. Handedness was determined by the Harris Test of Lateral Dominance. Subjects were required to write the numbers 1 through 12 simultaneously, as quickly as possible. Speech measures were derived from the Stuttering Severity Instrument and from a reading passage. Stutterers performed more poorly than nonstutterers on all speech measures. There were no differences in bimanual handwriting performance for the dominant hand. However, stutterers performed more poorly than nonstutterers in nondominant handwriting. There were no relationships between speech measures and bimanual handwriting for stutterers or nonstutterers. Some stutterers performed better on the handwriting task than did some nonstutterers. It is suggested that disorganization in interhemispheric integration functions may be a more fundamental problem in stuttering than is incomplete cerebral dominance.     

Building theories of reading ability: On the relation between individual differences in cognitive skills and reading comprehension

To date most theories of reading ability have emphasized a single factor as the major source of individual differences in performance. However there has been little agreement on what that factor is. However, candidates have included visual discrimination, phonological and semantic recoding, short-term memory, and utilization of linguistic knowledge and context. The single- factor theories are summarized. Literature is then reviewed to show that no single-factor theory is likely to be right, because a very wide range of component skills and abilities has in fact been shown to correlate with reading success. Among them are discrimination of letter location and letter order during perceptual recognition, use of orthographic regularity as an aid to visual code formation, use of spelling-to-sound regularity in phonological recoding, memory for word order, spontaneous identification of syntactic relations, flexibility in prediction from syntactic and semantic context, and context-specificity in semantic encoding. It is concluded that more complex, multifactor models of reading ability are required, and some recent attempts to collect data conducive to such a model are described. In the process, three different approaches to identifying factors relevant to reading success are delineated. These are general abilities assessment, learning potential assessment, and component skills analysis. Two methods of conducting component skills analysis are presented, and it is recommended that they be used as converging operations. Finally, the results of a component skills analysis are used to construct a tentative example of a class of hierarchical models of reading ability that can be pursued developmentally.     

Pressures from work,self, and home in the life stages of married women

Following Lopata's (1966) model of the life cycle of the married woman's role, it was predicted and found that a woman's life stage would be related to her role pressures (work, home, self, and time), conflict, and satisfaction. Age and number of roles were not as strongly related to these variables as was life stage. Work activities and pressures declined through the peak child-rearing stage and then increased for women with older children, while pressures from home generally rose throughout the life cycle. The differential impact of various sources of conflict in different life stages was reported, and forms of organizational career support oriented toward particular life stages were suggested.     

Suggestibility and type of interpersonal relationship: Special implications for the patient-practitioner relationship

Suggestibility was assessed in five conditions by the subject's response to suggestions falsely labeled as matters of fact. These misrepresentations of fact, or virtual suggestions, denoted a variety of hallucinations, an anesthesia, and an amnesia. They were administered as incidental intrusions while the subject was involved in the primary experimental task. In three of these conditions, the subject either observed his own spontaneous visual imagery, observed visual scenes provided by the experimenter, or simply waited with closed eyes for the presentation of the virtual stimuli. These conditions were characterized by a passive-receptive, interpersonal relationship in which the subject remained silent. Suggestibility was expected to be high. In a fourth condition the subjects described spontaneous visual imagery. This was characterized as an active-receptive relationship in which speech was maintained throughout. The suggestibility of the three passive-receptive conditions was comparable, and none of them differed from a baseline condition involving the formal induction of hypnosis. However, the fourth, active-receptive condition was significantly lower, and this difference survived a replication. Of special interest was the induction of an anesthesia in the majority of subjects in the three passive-receptive conditions.     

Belief discrepant behavior and the bogus pipeline: Impression management or arousal attribution

Based on recent studies impression management theorists conclude that following belief discrepant behavior, persons will feign attitude change on paper measures, but report their “true” beliefs when attached to a lie detector (the bogus pipeline). A dissonance arousal explanation of these bogus pipeline results suggests that subjects may attribute their arousal to the bogus pipeline equipment instead of to dissonance and therefore may not be motivated to change their attitudes. The present study examined these competing interpretations and yielded results which support the dissonance arousal attribution explanation. Subjects who were attached to a (bogus pipeline) lie detector exhibited attitude change if given the opportunity to get accustomed to the equipment (which made attribution of arousal to the equipment less plausible), but showed no attitude change if no habituation experience was provided.     

The influence of incentive-aroused ambivalence on overjustification effects in attitude change

Rewarding people to advocate a position with which they already agree can undermine their attitudinal positivity. This research tests a novel explanation of this example of the overjustification phenomenon. The hypothesis holds that the provision of an unnecessary incentive gives rise to an ambivalent response: the positive reaction to the reinforcement is accompanied by a sense of uneasiness, or apprehension, regarding the legitimacy of the induced behaviors. Attitude change is expected only in circumstances that confirm the apprehension. Results consistent with this expectation were discovered. In Study 1, respondents asked to play the role of a subject in an overjustification experiment reported greater levels of ambivalence regarding their (role-played) proattitudinal action as a function of payment. Contrary to alternative interpretations of the phenomenon, no incentive-related differences were found in subjects' ratings of the reprehensibility of the requested action, or in their beliefs that future activities of the type requested be undertaken only for payment. In Study 2, subjects paid to read a proattitudinal speech were found subsequently to be less in favor of their original positions only if they also had been given a counterattitudinal communication. The presence or absence of the countercommunication had no influence on the attitudes of unpaid respondents. Subjects for whom the payment was made to appear incidental to the experiment did not demonstrate the usual overjustification effect. These results supported the incentive-aroused ambivalence hypothesis. Psychological mechanisms that might underlie the effect were discussed.     

Children's use of imagery in accessing different types of semantic information

Semantic retrieval was examined in second graders under an induced imagery and a control condition. Two types of animal properties, perceptual and functional, were presented to children for verification. Properties were high and low in rated association strength; the size of the property (i.e., large vs small) was also manipulated in the case of perceptual meaning. Results suggest that young children rely on imagery in semantic retrieval; however, second graders are also adept at processing functional as well as perceptual meaning, and at using an abstract memory accessing system. Thus, considerable flexibility is evidenced by subjects in semantic retrieval.