Search

The purpose of the project was to train parents and teachers of hearing impaired children in the use of cued speech and to provide support services to 10 schools and programs to enable them to serve as models. During 1968-69, 3537 parents and teachers attended workshops and demonstrations, and 486 parents in 41 classes received an average of 15.7 hours of instruction. During the followup program, 1969-71, resident services averaging 1.5 instructor months each were provided to 10 schools and programs. Materials developed and distributed included demonstration films, recorded lesson, handbooks for teachers and parents, and other printed materials. Correlation between extent of use of cued speech and reported beneficial effects on receptive and expressive language, speech and speechreading was significant at the 0.01 confidence level. Impact of the dissemination and parent training program seemed adequate, resulting in initiation of use of cued speech by enough schools and programs to give it a chance to prove its value. Impact of the followup program was insufficient to bring the participating programs to the level of models of use of the method. Several of the programs appear to be capable of reaching this level in another year or two. (Author)

Reported was program effectiveness for a cued speech program for aurally handicapped children in nursery and primary classes. Project objectives were explained to be training teachers and tutors (paraprofessionals) of the classes for the aurally handicapped and the parents of the pupils enrolled in the techniques of cued speech and to employ these techniques with children in nursery and primary levels. Participating were 15 teachers, 10 tutors, 60 children, and a limited number of parents. During the first year of the project, three areas of cued speech training were emphasized: development of vocabulary lists from which an instrument was designed to assess language acquisition by the children in receptive and expressive areas; training of all staff members in cued speech method of teaching language; and classes conducted for parents and other interested groups. The data regarding the language development of the children showed that receptive and expressive language acquisition could be measured with the test instrument developed and that these data clearly indicated the child's language growth. It was concluded that for cued speech to serve children to the greatest degree possible, more parents needed to participate in the program. (CB)

To expand sign language for simultaneous use along with fingerspelling and speech, signs were created for English terms frequently used in the classroom. Those signs judged very good or excellent in clarity and appearance were retained and selected ones taught by closed circuit television to Gallaudet students. Entering preparatory students recognized the English equivalent of about 66% of 92 new signs upon initial presentation. Seven months later they recognized about 75%. Upperclassmen were taught signs for specific subject matter in 12 areas and recognized about 80% initially. It was suggested that their higher rate of recognition resulted from increased familiarity with sign language and with the subject content. A listing is provided of the terms developed. (Author/JD)

Two experiments using the same Ss in one sitting tested the hypothesis that the temporal redundancy inherent in rhythmically structured sound sequences is used during listening by the perceptual mechanism. (Editor)

The Model Secondary School for the Deaf in the nation's capital seeks to show the way for preparing deaf students to enter college. (Editor)

Summary Volunteer male and female college students (N = 217) rated themselves on Sciortino's Inventory of Psychological Processes (IPP-3) immediately after the preparation, the production, and the revision stages of the Solutions Test. The preparation stage was administered under “warm-up” instructions, the production stage under “neutral” instructions, and the revision stage under “criteria-cued” instructions. Ss' combined scores on the IPP-3 from the preparation, production, and revision stages of the Solutions Test were, first, subjected to a principal components analysis, and, then, rotated according to Kaiser's varimax procedure. Six varimax factors were extracted: crossfertilization, frustration, evaluated refinement, excitement, motivated thinking, and freewheeled thinking. The factor scores of each of the six extracted factors from the preparation, production, and revision stages of the Solutions Test were subjected to an analysis of variance for repeated measures. The results show that of the 18 ...

After presentation of categorized lists subjects were given category names to serve as retrieval cues and, in some cases, words from the original list as well. The primary finding was inhibition in recall of additional category instances when both category names and items were presented as compared to recall cued only by category names. These results were interpreted as incompatible with interitem associative theories but consistent with hierarchical theories. Presenting item cues was proposed to increment the strengths of these items to a superordinate control element and consequently decrease accessibility of other items. A secondary finding of output interference between successively recalled categories was attributed to decreasing accessibility of information not successfully integrated into higher-order units.

This experiment investigated the positive-forgetting phenomenon with sentence material. Sets of sentences were presented to Ss with each sentence being cued "remember" or "forget" immediately following its presentation. To-be-remembered (TBR) sentences were found to be more accessible thanto-be-forgotten (TBF) sentences and uncued control sentences. Sentence connectedness was found to be an important determiner of the magnitude of the observed recall phenomenon; but differential sentence interest was not a significant factor. Using a multiple-choice recognition test, key words or phrases from the to-be-forgotten sentences were found to be equally available as key words or phrases from the to-be-remembered sentences. These results warrant an extention of Bjork's (1970, 1972) selective-rehearsal and differential-grouping interpretation of the positive-forgetting phenomenon to encompass sentence material. Some implications of the findings for single-presentation information acquisition were noted.

Long-term retention of high- and low-imagery nouns was assessed in incremental free recall, paired-associates learning, and cued and noncued recall of noun pairs. In each case imagery had a clear positive effect on long-term retention, and the effect could not be explained by differential acquisition of the material. Results of the experiments were also examined by analyzing subjective organization, and by comparing cued and noncued recall. Such results were interpreted as supporting an imagery-organization hypothesis which asserts that images aroused by discrete verbal items can be combined into complex, integrated images, the components of which provide effective cues for retrieving or redintegrating the remainder of the unit.

Two aspects of the duration control of vowel production were examined in deaf and normally hearing subjects: inherent durational differences between two closely related vowels (/i/ and / i /) and the modifying influence of the following consonant. Twelve deaf and five normal adolescents pronounced 56 CV(C) words containing a vowel, /i/ or / i /, followed by /t, s, n, d, z, ø/. Whereas in normal speech the tense vowel /i/ is only relatively longer than the lax vowel / i /, in the speech of the deaf subjects these two vowels occupy much more restricted durational ranges. The modifying influence of a following sound is different in the case of the deaf subjects. Differences between the deaf and normal subjects do not appear to be simply errors of speech production, but reflect instead a different type of linguistic structure. The vowel production characteristics of the deaf subjects account in part for the low intelligibility of consonantal sounds in the speech of the deaf, and imply that standard articulation tests may be an ineffective means of assessing speech production processes of deaf speakers.

Chronic obsessive and compulsive behavior is a distressing and often crippling disorder which is highly resistant to treatment. The current investigation used the behavioral techniques of punishment and relaxation training to extinguish high frequency obsessive ruminations and verbal behavior in two female patients. Punishment involved an aversive stimulus, consisting of previously taped segments of the patients' high frequency verbal behavior which were played to the patient when she emitted that behavior. Relaxation training was used to minimize any anxiety-producing side effects of the punishment technique and to counter-condition anxiety either cued by or cueing the high frequency behaviors. The patients have during 20-month and 18-month follow-up periods respectively been free of the obsessive behavior and the anxiety previously associated with it.

Three list-item memory experiments explored the effects of three types of repetition of a basic unit consisting of two words in an explicitly designated conceptual category. The types were repetition of the complete basic unit, repetition of the category name with two new instances, and repetition of the category name only. All types of repetition showed a large facilitative effect on recall of the basic unit. The effect was considerably larger when repetitions were spaced rather than massed, and it manifested itself mainly in enhanced accessibility of higher-order units (categories) rather than access to elements within these units (words within accessible categories). The results as a whole suggest that the structure of the higher-order memory units is hierarchical, with access to the unit possible only through its control element.

After discrimination training on a multiple variable-interval extinction schedule of food reinforcement, pigeons were placed on the uncued or mixed version of the same schedule and allowed to make an optional "observing response" that converted the uncued schedule to the corresponding cued schedule by providing a 20-sec exposure to the appropriate discriminative stimulus. The schedule consisted of one hundred 40-sec components, and the probability that any one of them would be a variable-interval component was systematically varied between 0.00 and 1.00. The results showed that the amount of observing behavior was an inverted "U" function of the probability of the variable-interval component. Few observing responses occurred at probabilities of 0.00 or 1.00, and maximum responding occurred at a value less than 0.50.

“Same”-“different” reaction times (RTs) to random shapes varying independently in either brightness, size, or form were studied in an investigation of visual encoding and comparison processes. The comparison process was investigated by having the varying dimension either cued in advance (set) or not cued (no set). The encoding process was investigated by varying stimulus onset asynchronies. No significant difference was found for the set/no-set variables, providing some evidence for an integrality interpretation. However, the serial and parallel models would still hold if the set variable does not affect either dimensional processing rate or order. The significant difference found between the various stimulus onset asynchronies was interpreted as evidence for a limited-capacity encoding mechanism. The results were also consistent with a two-process model of comparison processes.

If natural rules in phonology, such as the rule which deletes a word final consonant before a consonant, are frequently found in unrelated languages, it must be because they tap universal features of production and/or perception. The present experiment employed a learning task to see whether naive subjects have a predisposition for the natural rule as opposed to its converse (consonant deletion before a vowel). The S s first learned four novel words (nouns) - two beginning with a consonant, two with a vowel - as paired associates to English ‘translations’. Then three novel adjectives were combined with each of the four nouns, following the natural rule for one group of S s, the unnatural rule for the other. The twelve phrases were cued by their English translations and the S had to respond to each with the phonologically correct sequence of adjective and noun; confirmation followed each response. The Ss learning the unnatural corpus had a strong tendency to give natural responses, whereas the converse was not true. Consequently they made many more errors en route to mastery than their natural counterparts, even when the operative rule was displayed on the first trial by presenting in turn each adjective with its four following nouns. It appears that our Ss had implicit knowledge of the natural rule, even though it does not operate to any significant extent in English.

Basic research in speech and the lateralization of language is shown to illuminate the problems of reading and some of its disabilities. First, it is pointed out how speech, or language for the ear, differs markedly from reading, or language for the eye. Though the sounds of speech are a very complex code and the optical shapes of written language are a simple cipher or alphabet on the phonemes, we all perceive speech easily but read only with difficulty. Perceiving speech is easy because, as members of the human race, we all have access to a special physiological apparatus that decodes the complex speech signal and recovers the segmentation of the linguistic message. Reading is hard because the phonemic segmentation, which is automatic and intuitive in the case of speech, must be made fully conscious and explicit. The syllabic method supplemented by phonics (used with certain reservations) is suggested for remediation of segmentation problems. Second, it is posited that since the sounds of speech are processed differently from non-speech sounds, the two should not be diagnosed and remediated interchangeably. Third, it is shown that the relationships among cerebral lateralization for language, handedness and poor reading can now be studied more meaningfully because of the recent development of new techniques. A truism often heard in the opening lecture of graduate classes in education is that we have few answers to the problems that beset us, only questions. In the field of reading, the difficulty may be owing at least in part to our impatient attempts to find immediate solutions for the teacher and the student in the classroom, and our consequent neglect of basic research. I should like to suggest today how knowledge of basic research in related disciplines may lead to clues for improving beginning reading instruction and the lot of the disabled reader—if only by affording us a deeper understanding of the reading process.

Two functions of the ear are described, one for the purpose of speech production, the other for the purpose of speech reception. The understanding of the differences is important for the clinician engaged in speech therapy with the hearing-impaired child. A therapy approach, based on the speech system as a servomechanism, is outlined utilizing the proprioceptive and tactile mechanisms as primary source information with the auditory as secondary.

Discrimination of an acoustic variable (various durations of silence) was measured when, as part of a synthetic speech pattern, that variable cued a phonemic distinction and when the same variable appeared in a non-speech context. in the speech case the durations of silence separated the two syllables of a synthesized word, causing it to be heard as rabid when the intersyllabic silence was of short duration and as rapid when it was long. with acoustic differences equal, discrimination proved to be more acute across the /b,p/ phoneme boundary than within either phoneme category. This effect approximated what one would expect on the extreme assumption that the listeners could hear these sounds only as phonemes, and could discriminate no other differences among them; however, the approximation was not so close as for certain other consonant distinctions. In the case of the non-speech sounds the same durations of silence separated two bursts of noise tailored to match the onset, duration, and offset characteristics of the speech signals. There was, with these stimuli, no appreciable increase in discrimination in the region corresponding to the location of the phoneme boundary. If we assume that the functions obtained with the non-speech patterns represent the basic discriminability of the durations of silence, free of the influence of linguistic training, we may conclude that the discrimination peaks in the speech functions reflect an effect of learning on perception. It was found, too, that discrimination of the non-speech patterns was, in general, poorer than that of the speech. From this we conclude that the effect of learning must have been to increase discrimination across the phoneme boundary; there was no evidence of a reduction in discrimination within the phoneme category.

A comparative analysis of kindergarten teachers’ speech with each other and with their students in the classroom demonstrated significant differences on several measures of speech complexity. It wa...

Recall of complex sentences at two retention intervals was examined, using sentences which varied simultaneously in three ways, being either active or passive, of low or high Yngve depth, and predictable or unpredictable. Recall of any particular sentence was cued with either the logical subject, logical object, verb or adverbial phrase noun. In general, unpredictable sentences were recollected better than predictable ones, low Yngve depth sentences were recalled better than high Yngve depth ones, and passive sentences were retained better than active ones. The most effective cue was the object, followed in turn by the subject and the adverbial phrase noun, with the verb being least effective. Implications of these findings are discussed.

Subjects generated and wrote descriptions of interactive images for triplets of concrete nouns. This was followed by a surprise cued recognition or cued recall test. Uniqueness of the imagined relationship between the cues and the other items was operationally defined and shown to be very highly correlated with memory performance. Uniqueness may be the critical component of the bizarreness prescribed in the ancient imagery mnemonics.

Comparison was made of two methods for training monkeys to “observe” a two-member serial position sequence by pressing two consecutively lighted keys and then to “report” the sequence by pressing the same two keys in the same order but without the lights. A fading technique involving gradual elimination of brightness cues from “reporting” keys was found more effective than a no-fading procedure in which the cues remained bright during training and then were suddenly removed. Animals that failed to learn to report a new sequence with the no-fading procedure sometimes developed behavior incompatible with that desired. They made repeated and specific errors that prematurely terminated trials of the sequence to-be-learned, even though the correct key was cued by a bright light. They behaved appropriately, however, on succeeding trials of other sequences. Thus, the errors were followed by trials on which reinforcement occurred. Manipulation of this contingency indicated its importance in maintaining the stereotyped error patterns.

The conversion between phonetic message and acoustic signal, i.e. , speech, is a grammatical code, similar in interesting ways to syntax and phonology. Being more accessible to experiment, speech should, therefore, be an inviting object of study for those interested in the psychology of grammar. Experiments on speech have already provided some information about the psychological processes associated with the use of grammatical codes.

Differential conditioning of verbal operants using covert stimuli, based on Cautela's covert reinforcement and covert sensitization methods of self control therapy, was studied in the laboratory. Each of 22 subjects was trained to visualize a reinforcing and an aversive scene, based on reported preferences from stimuli on the Reinforcement Survey Schedule. The operant was the emission of a number between 0 and 100. For one group the consequence of responding with a number ending in 1–3 was the self-presented reinforcing scene cued by the experimenter, with the aversive scene contingent upon a number ending in 7–9. The consequences were reversed for the other group. The results showed that contingent covert stimuli significantly changed the rates of the selected operants from baseline. This study supports Cautela's contention that covert stimuli can control behavior. The difficulty of measuring the covert stimulus was noted.

The mother of a 3-yr-old girl who showed "autistic-like" behavior was cued via an FM wireless microphone systematically to approve and disapprove of her child's behavior. After baselines were taken on two categories of problem behavior (Pre-Academic and Social Behavior), the social contingencies were applied successively to each category. The Pre-Academic task was quickly established in the child when the mother applied these social contingencies. This result was replicated with requests for social interaction. In the final phase, cueing was withdrawn from both situations and the mother was able to maintain the child's improved behavior. An analysis of the mother's behavior suggested that her increased use of social punishment for inappropriate behavior was the key factor in the child's increasing responsiveness. Follow-up seven months later indicated that the improvements maintained.

Attempts to develop special aids for speech communication and speech correction of severely hard-of-hearing or totally deaf persons have been going on since the beginning of the 1920's. For information transmission, the auditory, tactual, and visual senses have been used. These aids have in many cases been called "sensory aids for the deaf" in analogy with the "sensory aids for the blind" that make it possible for the blind to read ordinary letters, perceive obstacles, and so on. Recently, the name "speech analyzing aids" has been suggested, which seems to be more adequate, as some types of speech analyzing techniques are used in contrast to the linear amplification used in most ordinary hearing aids. In the development of "speech analyzing aids for the deaf" two problems must be considered: 1) Which elements of the speech signals ought to be automatically extracted and transmitted to the deaf subject? 2) What kind of signals and which sense modality shall be used for the transmission of the extracted speech information? Speech is learned by imitation which means that an efficient aid for speech perception also can be used for speech learning. However, in several respects it is better to treat aids for speech correction and speech perception as separate problems. Here, for the most part, only aids for speech perception will be discussed. An attempt will be made to summarize the development in this area and to discuss published results from experiments with different types of equipment. Some suggestions for future experiments will be given.

Discriminated force responses were obtained from monkeys working in the presence of visual cues. The cues signified: (1) force within a band appropriate to produce food reinforcement; (2) force too great; and, (3) force too small to produce reinforcement. Elimination of visual cues was accompanied by immediate deterioration in performance of the force discrimination, which failed to reach visually cued levels, even with extended sessions. Restoration of visual cues resulted in return to original performance levels, but only after several sessions. Incompatible response modes underlie performance in the two situations.

A cueing effect, defined as the facilitation of recognition of a to-be-remembered (TBR) word by the reinstatement of an item which accompanied it at encoding, was found in two studies after learning with imagery instructions but not with associative instructions. The cueing effect was found with imagery instructions when the cues were either concrete nouns unrelated to the TBR or pictures of an ordered walk (the method of locations). In the case of recall, a cueing effect was found using associative learning instructions with unrelated concrete nouns. It is argued that imagery instructions produce strong unitization of encoding, requiring redintegration of the unitized pair at the time of testing along with decoding of the TBR.

Homographic nouns were presented in sentence contexts as subject and object referents, where the nouns were repeated in either the same, similar, or different semantic contexts with either 0, 4, or 16 intervening sentences (lag). When cued with subject nouns, recall of object nouns varied directly with lag for both the same- and similar-context sentences but inversely with lag for different-context sentences. Also, repetition of different-context sentences at lag 0 and similar-context sentences at all lags led to better recall than when repetition occurred in the same context. These findings suggest that the effectiveness of repetition, in part, depends jointly on the semantic context in which repetition occurs and on the lag between repeated events.

Sammary.-2 verbal mazes differing in number of alternatives per choice were employed in Exp. I. The number of alternatives significantly affected acquisition but not retention. In Exp. 11, 3 groups of Ss learned a 4-alternative, 8-choice maze. Retention was tested under conditions of recognition, serial recall, or cued serial recall. Results indicated that cues including the position of the correct alternative did not provide an advantage over serial recall. Some methodological advantages of the verbal maze such as that of manipulating the stimulus phase while holding the response task constant, were mentioned. The verbal maze was devised by Peterson (1918), who described it as a memory-reason test. The verbal maze task consists of serial sets of alternatives, a way in which the correct alternatives may be discovered, and a number of practice trials in which the correct response may be fixated. In addition to studies of rational learning (Garrison, 1928), such mazes were viewed as suitable transition tasks to employ in the comparison of verbal and motor learning (McGeoch & Melton, 1928). Difficulty was often a parameter in the latter setting. Peterson (1918) said, ". . . the difficulty of the problem can be increased or decreased to any desired degree, without interfering with the general principle of the experiment." One way of increasing difficulty was by increasing the length of the maze. Difficulty may also be increased by increasing the number of alternatives at a choice point. Acquisition and serial position effects were studied in such mazes by Brogden and Schmidt ( 1954). In the first of the present experiments, serial recall as well as acquisition was measured as a function of number of alternatives per choice point. EXPERIMENT I Method The data were collected in two introductory psychology classes. In one class, 33 Ss were present for both learning and memory tests. In the other class, 36 Ss were present for both sessions. Three Ss were randomly discarded from the larger class. Two mazes were composed of nonsense syllables of low association value (Stevens, 195 1). For the easy maze, a pair of alternatives was present at each of the 8 choice points. For the difficult maze, 4 alternatives were present at each of the 8 choice points. For each maze the correct alternative occurred equally often in each of the possible positions. The syllables designated as correct responses were identical in the two mazes.

Two major obstacles have hindered progress in the development of speech processing aids for the deaf. The first is a lack of basic knowledge as to how speech is acquired, produced, and perceived. The second is a paucity of objective, evaluative data on potentially useful aids. This paper reviews progress in the development of speech processing aids, both for speech perception and for speech training. Progress with training aids is quite promising and reasonably positive evaluative data are currently being obtained. The use of synthetic speech as a research tool in simulating speech problems is discussed and preliminary simulation data are presented.

Two short-term memory experiments investigated the effects of instructions to forget. In Exp. I, proactive interference (PI) was reduced when 5s were cued to forget the first of two trigrams; but there was no reduction in retroactive interference when 5s were cued to forget the second. The residual amount of PI depended upon the acoustic similarity of the two trigrams. In Exp. II, PI was reduced when 5s were cued to forget the first 6 words in a 12-word sequence. A subsequent recognition test, however, showed that the to-beforgotten words were recognized as often as words taken from sequences with no forget cue. The results supported a hypothesis that the effects of a forget cue are due to differential storage and retrieval of to-be-remembered and tobe-forgotten items. Forgetting is usually considered to be an inevitable, undesirable result of the process

Sixty prereaders were trained to discriminate the graphemes within words by having them assemble the Words using only those graphemes that corresponded to the phonemic structure of the words. The children were first trained using orthographies that provided cues emphasizing the graphemic structure; either i. t. a. or one of two cued orthographies retaining the English alphabetic characters. The children then assembled the same words printed in the traditional orthography (t. o.) which provides no graphemic cues. As hypothesized, transfer to t. o. was easier for Ss initially trained with cued orthographies retaining English characters than for Ss trained with i. t. a. In addition, transfer from i. t. a. was facilitated when combined with one of the orthographies retaining English characters.

The effects of various doses of ethanol on DRL performance was examined in rats under conditions of cued and non-cued DRL tasks and under conditions of low versus high baseline performance criteria. The dose-level at which ethanol produced a significant reduction in number of responses and reinforcements interacted in a complex fashion with level of baseline performance, the cue conditions, and the order of DRL tasks. Generally, performance was impaired at a lower dose level for groups initially trained to a low criterion of DRL performance than for groups later trained to a higher criterion of DRL performance, regardless of cue condition. Further, the dose level at which ethanol impaired performance (as indicated by number of reinforcements obtained) under non-cued DRL conditions was lower than that for the cued DRL conditions, but only on the initial task where baseline DRL performance criterion was lower. Finally, the group with a higher baseline level of responding (i.e., poorer DRL performance) was more vulnerable to the disrupting effects of ethanol on this measure than groups with lower baseline response rates.