bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Phonetic Symbolism in Adult Native Speakers of Czech
Authors: Tarte Robert D.
Published: July 2017

10 monolingual adult speakers of Czech were asked to label elliptical and triangular figures of different size with phonetic nonsense syllables. The purpose of the study was to obtain evidence in support of the "phonetic symbolism " hypothesis, and to attempt to replicate the findings of Tarte and Barritt (1971) with English speakers. Subjects agreed about the relationship between vowel sounds and the size and shape of figures, both between themselves and compared to the findings with speakers of English. The sound /a/ was preferred with large figures, /i/ with small; /u/ was chosen more often with ellipses, /i/ with triangles. It was concluded that this study does lend support to the existence of phonetic symbolism and its generality.
On the Child's Acquisition of Semantic Structure Underlying the Wordfield of Prepositions
Authors: Grimm Hannelore
Published: July 2017

Spontaneously produced prepositional phrases of 115 preschoolers, 2.7-5.11 years old and of 22 first-graders are analysed. Our main interest lies in anomalous combinations since these allow us to establish which features and selection restrictions responsible for the anomaly the children have not yet acquired. The main results are as follows: (a) the development sequence of spatial prepositions concurs with the development of spatio-geometric properties shown by Piaget. This is suggested by the distribution of frequencies of used prepositions as well as by the systematic replacements of complex by simple prepositions. (b) Temporal prepositions are much rarer than spatial ones. Only such temporal prepositions occur which are also used in a locative sense. Substitutions among prepositions indicate a still incomplete distinction between concrete-local and abstract-temporal notions. (c) Purely grammatical prepositions are acquired within a gradual process of voiding of semantic meaning.

The general validity of resulting rules and the existing interrelation between structural changes in language and cognition is dealt with in the discussion.
The Development of English Morphology: an Acquisition Model
Authors: Ivimey G.P.
Published: July 2017

The formation and use of morphological rules was studied in a large sample of English school children, aged 31/2-91/2 years and of average ability. It was found that children induce grammatical rules after a lengthy exposure to adult language models and after the learning of specific forms. Construction of appropriate rules may take many years and children pass through clearly defined stages of rule building. The rate and order of acquisition can be correlated with the characteristics of the adult language models to which they are exposed. Critical factors in these adult models are (1) frequency of occurrence of forms (2) regularity or its absence in adult usage.
Effects of Speech Rate on Personality Perception
Authors: Smith Bruce L. , Brown Bruce L. , Strong William J. , Rencher Alvin C.
Published: July 2017

Using the voices of six subjects, representing various social and educational backgrounds, fifty-four synthetic voices were generated by computer. Each normal voice was both increased and decreased in rate by 121/2, 25, 371/2, and 50 per cent. Judges evaluated the fifty-four voices using a series of adjectives representing two major personality factors of " competence " and " benevolence ".

Several statistical analyses were performed, and it was found that the competence factor was much more sensitive to rate manipulations than was the benevolence factor. Ratings of competence were found to increase as rate increases and decrease as rate decreases, in a linear fashion. Benevolence had an inverted U-relationship with speech rate; the highest benevolence ratings occurred with normal speech rate.
A Method for Investigating the Perceptual Segmentation of Speech
Authors: Riding Richard J.
Published: July 2017

A simple method of investigating the sub-units in which speech is perceived was proposed. The aural presentation of a story was abruptly stopped and followed by a retention interval task which was designed to displace from short-term memory its contents. It was argued that the recall, after the task, of the last word retained would be the final word to enter long-term memory and hence the terminal word of a sub-unit. The results showed that subjects' recall followed a common pattern which appeared to be syntactically determined.
Effects of Frequency " Recoding " on the Articulation Learning of Perceptively Deaf Children
Authors: Velmans Max
Published: July 2017

The effect of a speech " recoding " device on the articulation learning (by imitation) of sensori-neural, partially-hearing children was evaluated. It was found that a " frequency shift " of speech components above 4000 c.p.s. down to the residual hearing range of the children, when combined with selective amplification and amplitude compression, led to significantly better articulation learning of consonants with major spectral components in the " shifted " region, than when selective amplification and amplitude compression only were used, the improvement being manifest within only seven training sessions of five to ten minutes, under each condition of amplification. Further, " recoding " produced a small but significant improvement in articulation transfer-of-training, measured by ability to imitate the same consonants occurring in different phonemic contexts, uttered in a different voice to that used in training. However, the superior discrimination and articulation of " recoded " consonants did not suffice to establish the " recoded " words (in which the consonants were embedded) as substitute labels for corresponding pictures (or concepts) in preference to already " known " non-recoded word labels, emphasizing the need in such experiments to separately investigate the effects of a given training procedure or " recoding " technique on discrimination, articulation, and picture (or concept) labelling.
The Formality of the Latinate Lexicon in English
Authors: Levin Harry , Long Susan , Schaffer Carole A.
Published: July 2017

The hypothesis tested is that under instructions to be formal or in tasks that very in formality, English words whose origins are Latinate will be chosen in preference to words whose etymologies are Anglo-Saxon. In the first experiment, instructions to be neutral, moderately formal or very formal led to the completion of sentences by words that were Latinate and rare in preference to Anglo-Saxon synonyms. The second study asked subjects to imagine themselves in situations that were less or more formal, e.g., talking to a friend v. a job interview. The choices can be explained by textual frequencies of the words rather than their etymologies. Finally, a replication of the first experiment with neutral and strongly formal instructions indicated again that formality implies Latinate, textually infrequent words. We conclude that the strategy to be formal in writing or speaking must be explicitly given to the subjects and that the situations that call out Latinate choices must be unequivocally formal.
Children's Articulation of Medial Consonant Clusters: Implications for Syllabification
Authors: Stockman Ida J. , Stephenson Lillie Wharton
Published: July 2017

Among solutions to syllabification of medial clusters are those which yield syllable assignment for medial consonants that conform to constraints on word initial and final segments. In this study, selected speaker/listener performances on medial clusters were compared with response trends for word initial/final consonants. Thirty preschool children (ten at each of three articulation proficiency levels on /s/ based on deep test scores) imitated 40 nonsense bisyllables of equal stress. The stimuli included intervocalic unclustered /s/, as well as consonant clusters that conformed to word initial /s/ clusters and those that did not. Syllable assignment was imposed on the medial consonants using boundary insertion rules proposed by Hooper (1972, 1973). Performance differences between medial clusters with assigned tautosyllabic and heterosyllabic features in both the frequency and pattern of articulation errors appeared to reflect constraints on word initial/final segments. The results suggest that medial contiguous consonants that conform to word initial clusters and those that do not should be differentially treated in syllable boundary assignment.
Differences in the F0 Patterns of Speech: Tone Language Versus Stress Language
Authors: Eady Stephen J.
Published: July 2017

A comparison was made between the fundamental frequency (F0) patterns of continuous speech in Mandarin Chinese and American English. Seven adult male native speakers of each language were asked to read an unemotional narrative text written in their language. The analysis showed the Fo patterns of Chinese to have a greater amount of dynamic movement than those of English. The speech of the Mandarin subjects displayed a greater average rate of Fo change than that of the American subjects. The Chinese speech was also characterized by more Fo fluctuations (peaks and valleys) as a function of time and as a function of the number of syllables. The results are consistent with the notion that the Fo patterns of Mandarin Chinese (a tone language) are determined mainly by the tone contours of all the lexical items in a sentence, while the Fo patterns of American English (a stress language) are determined mainly by the placement of primary stress on only a few of the lexical items in a sentence.
The Prosodic and Paralinguistic Features of Reading and Telling Stories
Authors: Levin Harry , Schaffer Carole A. , Snow Catherine
Published: July 2017

Four teachers read and told preschool children well-known stories which were recorded. Two composite tapes were prepared from the recordings. Ten-second sections of tape were spliced together to form 112 randomly intermixed examples of each teacher reading and telling stories to two groups of children. Fifty-six items were treated by a low-pass filter which removed all content information but preserved prosodic and paralinguistic information. Two groups of 11 adult subjects each judged whether the segment was an example of reading or telling. For both filtered and unfiltered speech, the subjects could accurately discriminate reading from telling; they were more accurate on the unfiltered portions of the tape. A qualitative analysis of items easy and difficult to judge correctly, indicated a number of variables that were probably instrumental in making the reading-telling distinction. These variables were coded from the original unfiltered tapes. Reading appears to be more rapid and free of hesitations, which can be explained by story telling being a cognitively creative task. An important stylistic variant is the placement of the speaker-tag before or after a quotation. The tag after the quote is a literary form almost never used in telling stories; the tag before the quote is used both in reading and telling.
Case Study of a Thai Transcortical Motor Aphasic
Authors: Gandour J. , Dardarananda R. , Vibulsreth S. , Buckingham H.W.
Published: July 2017

This paper presents a case study of a 52-year-old right-handed Thai patient with clinical and pathoanatomic evidence of major infarction in the left frontal lobe. He was studied at 4½ years poststroke with a Thai adaptation of the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Exam and supplementary tests. His language characteristics included nonfluent spontaneous speech, good repetition and near-normal auditory language comprehension, similar to the syndrome called "transcortical motor aphasia." The underlying mechanism of this particular language disturbance is reviewed. It is suggested that this patient's case profile matches one of Goldstein's (1948) two types of transcortical motor aphasia.
Dynamics of Vowel Articulation
Authors: Alfonso Peter J. , Baer Thomas
Published: July 2017

The dynamics of vowel articulation was studied by simultaneously monitoring articulator muscle activity, movement, and acoustic output while a single speaker produced multiple repetitions of 10 different vowels in a / pVp/ environment. Analysis of the data from the three measurement levels provided a complete physiological description of the subject's vowel space and showed good agreement among the different levels of description. Intra-articulator timing measurements, e.g., the relationship between posterior genioglossus EMG activity and tongue movements, and inter-articulator timing measurements, e.g., the relationship between tongue and lip movements, indicated a differentiation in the timing of tongue movement components. Vowel-related vertical tongue movements always began at about the moments of implosion for the initial stop. Horizontal movements associated with front vowels began at the same time as vertical movements, whereas horizontal movements associated with back vowels began earlier, at the onset of the syllable. For certain vowel environments, tongue and other articulator anticipatory gestures were found to be linguistically significant since listeners were able to correctly label the vowel when presented with only the schwa segment of the syllable.
Distribution of Kinesic Hesitation Phenomena in Spontaneous Speech
Authors: Ragsdale J. Donald , Fry Silvia Catherine
Published: July 2017

Forty college student volunteers, equally divided by sex, participated in a study of vocal hesitations and kinesic hesitation phenomena in an anxiety-producing interview conducted by male and female interviewers. The vocal hesitations were of Mahl's non-ah type and included sentence change, repetition, stutter, omission, sentence incompletion, tongue slip, and intruding incoherent sounds. The kinesic hesitation phenomena included head, hand, arm, leg, and foot movement, posture change, and body shift.

The results showed a close relationship between the occurrences of vocal hesitations and movement. Additionally, they showed clear differences in the frequency of occurrence of the kinds of vocal hesitations and movements. Finally, it was found that the most common location of a kinesic phenomenon is just before or simultaneously with a nonfluency rather than after one. The findings lend support to the idea that vocal and nonvocal behaviors may not always be so interdependent as parallel.
Production of American English and Spanish Vowels
Authors: Mendez Antonio
Published: July 2017

The acoustical spectrum of the Spanish vowels /i, a, u/ and their English counterparts were analyzed and compared. The English speakers were asked to produce the /i, a, u/ vowel sounds as in the words heed, father, food but in isolation, while the Spanish speakers produced the vowel sounds as in si, paso, tu. Statistical analysis showed no significant difference for the vowels /i, a/ between languages. For the vowel /u/, there was a statistically significant difference. These observations indicate that on the average both vowel systems (for /i, a/) are produced with similar peak frequencies in the acoustic spectrum. The spectrographic analysis of vowel /u/ does not point toward acoustical equivalency.
Sex-Related Differences in the Color Lexicon
Authors: Nowaczyk Ronald H.
Published: July 2017

Two experiments investigated sex-related differences in the color vocabulary of college students. In the first experiment, students were required first to provide color names for a series of color stimuli and then to match color names with the same stimuli. Sex-related differences were found only in the matching task. Men used more basic color terms than women, while women were better able to match correctly elaborate color terms with the appropriate stimuli. In the second experiment, students described the colors represented by a series of elaborate color terms. Women not only described more terms than men, they also used more elaborate descriptions. The results indicate that college-age women have a more extensive color vocabulary than men. It is proposed that this difference in the color lexicon indicates that women possess more distinct internal representations for color than men.
An Effect of Sentence Finality on the Phonetic Significance of Silence
Authors: Rakerd Brad , Dechovitz David R. , Verbrugge Robert R.
Published: July 2017

The presence or absence of silence was found to be a relevant cue for the distinction between affricate /t∫/ and fricative /∫/ when it occurred in sentence-medial position, but not when it occurred at a sentence boundary. This was so in all cases in which target words and their precursors were both produced by the same talker and in some cases in which they were produced by different talkers. The effect was not dependent on specific durations of the silent interval, nor upon listeners' perceptions of the number of talkers who had produced the utterances. These results are, along with previous findings, taken to be consistent with the principle that silence can have phonetic significance for a listener only when it is perceived to have occurred in a stretch of speech that was articulated continuously.
The Name Game: Creative and Practical Names for a Building
Authors: Carroll John M.
Published: July 2017

Naming takes place in both "practical" and "creative" situations. A priori one might imagine that names generated in situations that contrast with respect to their practical/ creative character would be fundamentally different (e.g., structurally). An analysis was conducted of "creative" alternative names for the New York Exposition and Conference Center, collected in a newspaper contest. The results are considered in light of a prior analysis of "practical" computer filenames. From an appropriate level of abstraction, it appears that the principles governing naming are analogous in both situations — although the character of the naming task domain ("creative" versus "practical") modulates the expression of the principles.
Sentence Planning in a Story Continuation Task
Authors: Holmes V.M.
Published: July 2017

Subjects were asked to give brief continuations to short stories about everyday events. Voice initiation times as well as pauses and disruptions within utterances were recorded. The results for the voice initiation times indicated that advance planning of the whole utterance occurred, whether it was one sentence or more than one. While the number of finite (surface) clauses added to planning time, the number of basic (deep) clauses did not. Probability of pausing during the output was highest at sentence boundaries, and finite clauses were preceded by pauses more often than basic clauses. Since the probability of pausing was determined largely by the degree of linguistic integration of the succeeding unit with the preceding one, the pauses appeared to have primarily a rhetorical rather than a planning function. In demonstrating considerable pre-planning and the importance of the finite clause, the results differed from those obtained in spontaneous speech situations, presumably because of the reduced cognitive and semantic processing load.
Nurturant Talk to Children
Authors: Levin Harry , Snow Catherine , Lee Kathie
Published: July 2017

The speech addressed to children, usually called Baby Talk, is not homogeneous. As Brown suggested, one dimension, "Communicative Clarity," controls the variables that contribute to simplifying the task of communicating to the child. The second dimension, "Affection/Nurturance," controls the variables that express a particular kind of social relationship between adult and child. The speech of mothers (and sometimes fathers) to 21 children aged four to nine years was recorded in two situations in a hospital: first in a waiting room and then in the recovery room following minor elective surgery. There were considerably more nurturant and supportive utterances in the post- compared to the pre-operative setting. Mothers spoke more slowly, used more affectionate terms. Fathers' speech followed the mothers' pattern. Parents of both sexes were more nurturant to their daughters during the pre-operative period, indicating that the post-operative setting was compelling enough to obviate individual differences. A cluster of variables describes the nurturant speech style: affectionate terms, prompted questions, disguised imperatives, use of hospital terms and low frequency of questions.
Laryngeal Management At Utterance-Internal Word Boundary in American English
Authors: Lisker L. , Baer T.
Published: July 2017

Much attention has been given to the acoustic and physiological means by which the /bdg/-/ptk/ distinction in English is signaled. The most important articulatory difference has been found to involve the nature and timing of laryngeal action associated with the stop articulation. For the labial stops /b/ and /p/ at least three, and possibly four, phonetic classes must be recognized, but we cannot assume that these make up the complete inventory of the ways in which American English speakers coordinate lip and larynx maneuvers in producing these phonemes. Acoustic and physiological data obtained from one American English speaker who produced utterances containing /b/ and /p/ in a variety of contexts showed at least five patterns of lip-larynx coordination, i.e., a degree of phonetic versatility usually encountered in studies comparing different speakers across different languages.
Conversational Time Patterns of Hawaiian Children as a Function of Ethnicity and Gender
Authors: Welkowitz Joan , Bond Ronald N. , Feldstein Stanley
Published: July 2017

Previous research concerned with conversational rhythms (i.e., the frequencies and durations of sound and silences in speech) has typically focused on the conversational behavior of Caucasian-American men and women. By comparison, there has been little attention given to the influence of ethnicity on conversational rhythms, which would attest to the cross-cultural consistency of temporal speech patterns. Similarly, little is known about the temporal patterning of children's speech, particularly with respect to the development of a stable vocal style. The present study examined the conversational behavior of eight-year-old Hawaiian boys and girls, of either Caucasian or Japanese descent, in same-ethnic and same-gender pairs or in mixed-ethnic and/or mixed-gender pairs. The results suggest that temporal speech patterns are stable characteristics of children's vocal behavior and that these conversational rhythms vary as a function of the ethnicity and/or gender of both speaking partners. Moreover, the pattern of differences obtained among the groups of children is believed to implicate established differences in personality, variations in socialization or differences in sex-role orientation.
"Are There Cognitive Rhythms in Speech?"- a Reply To Power (1983)
Authors: Beattie Geoffrey
Published: July 2017

Power (1983) has contested the claim that there are "cognitive rhythms" in speech. Cognitive rhythms are supposed to be rhythmic patterns discernible in graphs representing changes in the amount of pausing and phonation in speech. Power based his conclusions on a study of one-minute monologues, some of which involved secondary cognitive tasks. It is argued that Power's samples are highly unnatural and extremely restrictive and allow few general conclusions. Some of Power's misinterpretations of the previous literature on this topic are also discussed.
Hesitation Phenomena in the Spontaneous Speech of Normal and Articulatory-Defective Children
Authors: Ragsdale J. Donald , Sisterhen Daniel H.
Published: July 2017

The utterances of 40 children aged five to six and equally distributed as to age, sex, and group — normal or articulatory-defective - were recorded unobtrusively. Samples of each recording were analyzed for eight categories of hesitation phenomena. Retest recordings were made and analyzed for 16 of the subjects to assess temporal reliability of the hesitation phenomena. The results showed that, like adults, the children used ah phenomena and repetitions/stutters significantly more often than other hesitation phenomena. Articulatory-defectives, by contrast, used more non- ah phenomena. Articulatory-defective males exhibited significantly more hesitation phenomena generally than the other groups. Hesitation phenomena decreased with age for the males in the study but increased for females.
The Comprehension of Anaphoric Relations
Authors: Stevenson Rosemary J. , Vitkovitch Melanie
Published: July 2017

Three experiments tested the proposition that reference assignment is delayed, that is, interpretation is not completed, until some point after the reference term has been read. Subjects were presented with sentences containing either pronominal or elliptical references. The point at which pragmatic inferences could be used was manipulated. The results showed that subsequent content influenced both assignment times (experiments one and two) and reading times (experiment three). This result held for unambiguous elliptical references as well as for both ambiguous and unambiguous pronouns. The results support the proposal that assignment is delayed, allowing subsequent content to influence the process. It is suggested that delayed assignment occurs whenever information needed to complete the processing must be retrieved from elsewhere in the sentence. The results are also contrasted with the view that pronoun assignment is based on heuristic strategies.
The Physiological Specification of American English Vowels
Authors: Flege James Emil , Fletcher Samuel G. , McCutcheon Martin J. , Smith Steven C.
Published: July 2017

Use of a new opto-elcctronic device showed that the stressed vowels produced by a native speaker of English could be clearly differentiated according to tongue position. The distance of the tongue from four sensors located along the hard palate was measured in multiple tokens of vowels in a /b_b/ context. There was little token-to-token variability (standard deviations of less than 1.0 mm). With the exception of a reversal between the onglide of/e1/ and /∊/, the height of the tongue differed according to phonological height as expected. The tongue was lower in back vowels than corresponding front vowels, suggesting a biomechanical linkage between tongue height and frontness-backness. Schwa differed from all other vowels, from the “average” tongue configuration seen in stressed vowels, and from the “neutral” configuration in pauses. The talker, a Southerner, diphthongized /I/ and /∊ /, but showed relatively little tongue movement in /aU/(compared to that in /aI/ and /OI/). Relatively little tongue movement was also seen in the /aU/ spoken by a second talker, who showed a significantly greater change in upper lip position in producing /aU/ than in /aI/ or /oI/. This finding suggests that lip rounding and tongue movement may “trade off” as articulatory means for producing the rapid spectral change in diphthongs.
Functional Lateralization of Linguistic Tones: Acoustic Evidence from Norwegian
Authors: Ryalls John , Reinvang Ivar
Published: July 2017

A group of five male right-hemisphere-damaged and five male left-hemisphere-damaged aphasics were recorded repeating a set of three phonemic tone-contrasted minimal pairs in Norwegian. A narrow-band spectrographic analysis revealed more impaired tone production (less phono-acoustic differentiation between phonemic pairs, and longer maximal productions) on the part of the left-hemisphere group than the right-hemisphere group, although the productions of the right-hemisphere group also seemed to be perturbed. A perceptual test of the patients' recorded productions by a native speaker revealed more lexical errors due to poor tone contrasts on the part of the left-hemisphere-damaged group. These results are discussed and compared to previous studies of linguistic tones in the neurological literature.
Intonation Cues to Questions and Statements: How are they Perceived?
Authors: Wales Roger , Taylor Steven
Published: July 2017

The present study examined the extent to which perceptual differentiation between spoken questions and statements can be made on the basis of a small set of simple feature detectors. Neurophysiological studies have described “frequency sweep” detectors which might be fruitfully extended to this task. For a number of spoken contexts it was found that a good account of question/statement differentiation can be provided by a model incorporating detectors sensitive to increases (upsweeps) and decreases (downsweeps) in fundamental frequency. This model is consistent with the view that prosodic features may be detected by “preattentive” mechanisms, which involve primitive, parallel processes that extract features without requiring focused attention.
Maidese Versus Motherese — Is The Language Input of Child and Adult Caregivers Similar?
Authors: Nwokah Evangeline E.
Published: July 2017

This paper considers whether there is any difference in the amount and characteristics of language addressed to infants by their primary caregivers, the maid and the mother, in a society where multiple caregiving is commonplace. It also considers any possible effect on motherese of the mothers' belief in reincarnation. The language of 16 mothers and their 16 maids with 12-month old infants, was analyzed. There were significant differences in the amount of language and types of utterances, but few differences in the functions of the utterances or topics introduced.
Recursion in Development: Support for a Biological Model of Language
Authors: Dickinson Sandra
Published: July 2017

Recursion in adult language contributes to variety of surface form, paraphrase, and ambiguity. Developing recursion in child language reveals these characteristics. This paper, based on the naturalistic observation of phrase structure development in the speech of six monolingual preschoolers, reveals a gradual acquisition of grammatical categories. The data further demonstrate links between developmental stages in terms of connectors used and in terms of intonation. The results of my investigation suggest that children restructure utterances (rather than acquire entirely new ones) as stages develop. The data also suggest that in order to carry out this restructuring, children make use of auditory memory and problem solving abilities. I conclude that my observations of children's developing recursion can best be accounted for by a biological, cognitive-linguistic model.
Syntactic Clause Boundaries, Speech Timing, and Stuttering Frequency in Adult Stutterers
Authors: Klouda Gayle V. , Cooper William E.
Published: July 2017

Nine adult male stutterers read aloud sentences designed to test influences of major syntactic boundary locations on stuttering frequency and on aspects of speech timing. The stutterers were found to produce the same durational cues to syntactic boundary location previously found in normal speech production. Like normals, stutterers lengthen the duration of a word when it occurs in clause-final position, and they are more likely to place a pause following a word if that word precedes a major syntactic boundary. Moreover, these syntactically regulated speech timing effects occurred for stuttered as well as fluent sentences, indicating that the presence of stuttering episodes did not interrupt the processing of syntactic structure in the speech production of these stutterers. Finally, there was no evidence that the presence of a major syntactic boundary led to an increase in stuttering frequency. Taken together, these results suggest that the mechanisms which underlie stuttering in adults are most likely independent of those which underlie the planning and processing of syntactic units.
Perceptual and Acoustic Evidence for Reduced Fluency in The Vicinity of Stuttering Episodes
Authors: Howell Peter , Wingfield Trudie
Published: July 2017

A perceptual experiment and acoustic analyses were conducted to address the question whether stuttering occurs only at specific “moments” or whether it also affects the surrounding speech. Sections of stutterers' speech were extracted from clauses which were spoken completely fluently (control) or contained one stutter (experimental). in the experimental sections, only speech up to or following the stuttered word was employed. All sections were rated by independent groups of subjects for fluency, the nature of the excised stutter (repetition or prolongation), and the temporal position of the stutter relative to the fluent section that they heard (before or after). Two additional groups of listeners were asked to select from experimental-control pairs the section that had been drawn from near a stutter, and to indicate type and position of the stutter. Listeners could reliably judge which sections had been near a stutter and the type of that stutter, but not its position. Acoustic analyses showed that there were no differences in duration, rate, number of pauses, and average intensity between the experimental and control sections. However, there were significant differences in terms of the drop in intensity between the syllables in the respective sections. The perceptual identification of experimental versus control sections showed a significant relationship with this acoustic measure and with speech rate. The judgments about the type of stutter only correlated with drop in intensity. We conclude that stuttering episodes affect the intensity-time profile of the speech in their vicinity, and that listeners can use this acoustic information to infer the presence and type of the stutter.
Effects of Lexical Stress in Auditory Word Recognition
Authors: Slowiaczek Louisa M.
Published: July 2017

Although research examining the use of prosodic information in the processing of spoken words has increased in recent years, results from these studies have been inconclusive. The present series of experiments systematically examines the importance of one prosodic variable (lexical stress) in the recognition of isolated spoken words. Data collected in an identification task suggest that segmental information may be more heavily relied upon when appropriate lexical stress information is not available. Results of subsequent reaction time experiments support the hypothesis that lexical stress influences the processing of auditorily presented words. in three shadowing experiments, correctly stressed items were produced faster than incorrectly stressed items, and in a lexical decision experiment, correctly stressed words were classified faster than incorrectly stressed words. Thus, this work provides evidence across several experimental tasks for the use of lexical stress information in the processing of spoken words. Moreover, the data suggest that lexical stress should be an important aspect of the representation of words in an interactive model of auditory word recognition.
Sex- and Age-Related Differences in Colour Vocabulary
Authors: Simpson Jean , Tarrant Arthur W.S.
Published: July 2017

Data were collected on the colour names used by 26 females and 24 males in naming 200 colour samples. Women used more elaborate colour names than men but, contrary to other findings, older subjects of both sexes used more elaborate names than younger subjects. Older men in our sample had a more elaborate vocabulary than younger women, showing that although sex differences were well established, vocabulary continued to increase with age. Colour related hobbies were significantly correlated with enhanced vocabulary for the male group, but not for the female group.
An Occupational Health Services Initiative at a Women's Hospital in Kabul, Afghanistan
Authors: Kitt Margaret M. , Khalid Gulmakai , Rahimi Shakira , McCarthy Brian J.
Published: July 2017

This article describes the process of developing targeted occupational health services for the health care workers in a women's hospital in Kabul, Afghanistan, as part of a larger project to establish an obstetrics and gynecology residency training program at the facility. The goal was to create a feasible and sustainable program to: ( 1) address basic health care needs impacting the ability of these Afghan health care workers to optimize learning opportunities; ( 2) decrease absenteeism due to illness; ( 3) decrease the likelihood of infectious disease transmission among staff, from staff to patients, and from patients to staff; ( 4) foster belief that a healthy and safe working environment is a basic right; ( 5) begin to collect preliminary health status indicators on health care workers in this employee population; and ( 6) serve as an adaptable program to expand to other Afghan health care workers.
Outbreak Bias in Illness Reporting and Case Confirmation in Ciguatera Fish Poisoning Surveillance in South Florida
Authors: Begier Elizabeth M. , Backer Lorraine C. , Weisman Richard S. , Hammond Roberta M. , Fleming Lora E. , Blythe Donna
Published: July 2017

Objective.

Ciguatera fish poisoning is a potentially life-threatening disease caused by eating coral reef fish contaminated with ciguatoxins and is the most common marine poisoning. However, existing surveillance systems capture few cases. To improve regional ciguatera surveillance in South Florida, this study compared ciguatera illnesses in the Florida Poison Information Center–Miami (FPICM) call database to ciguatera cases in the Florida Department of Health (FDOH) disease surveillance systems.

Methods.

Univariate and multivariate logistic regression were used to identify predictors of when FPICM reported ciguatera illnesses to FDOH and whether FDOH confirmed reported ciguatera cases.

Results.

FPICM staff preferentially reported ciguatera illnesses that were of shorter duration (adjusted odds ratio [AOR]=0.84 per additional illness day; 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.74, 0.97); outbreak-associated (AOR=7.0; 95% CI 2.5, 19.5); and clinically more severe (AOR=21.6; 95% CI 2.3, 198.5). Among ciguatera illnesses reported to FDOH, outbreak-associated illnesses were more likely than single, sporadic illnesses to become confirmed surveillance cases (crude OR=11.1; 95% CI 2.0, 62.5).

Conclusions.

The over-representation of outbreak-associated ciguatera cases underestimates the true contribution of sporadic illnesses to ciguatera disease burden. This bias should be considered when evaluating surveillance systems that include both outbreak-associated and sporadic illness reports.
Infectious Disease Hospitalizations among Older American Indian and Alaska Native Adults
Authors: Holman Robert C. , Curns Aaron T. , Singleton Rosalyn J. , Sejvar James J. , Butler Jay C. , Paisano Edna L. , Schonberger Lawrence B. , Cheek James E.
Published: July 2017

Objectives.

American Indians and Alaska Natives (AI/AN) adults ≥65 years of age (older adults) have the second highest age group-specific infectious disease (ID) hospitalization rate. To assess morbidity and disparities of IDs for older AI/AN adults, this study examined the epidemiology of overall and specific infectious disease hospitalizations among older AI/AN adults.

Methods.

ID hospitalization data for older AI/AN adults were analyzed by using Indian Health Service hospital discharge data for 1990 through 2002 and comparing it with published findings for the general U.S. population of older adults.

Results.

ID hospitalizations accounted for 23% of all hospitalizations among older AI/AN adults. The average annual ID hospitalization rate increased 5% for 1990–1992 to 2000–2002; however, the rate increased more than 20% in the Alaska and the Southwest regions. The rate for older AI/AN adults living in the Southwest region was greater than that for the older U.S. adult population. For 2000–2002, lower respiratory tract infections accounted for almost half of all ID hospitalizations followed by kidney, urinary tract, and bladder infections, and cellulitis.

Conclusions.

The ID hospitalization rate increased among older AI/AN adults living in the Southwest and Alaska regions, and the rate for the older AI/AN adults living in the Southwest region was higher than that for the U.S. general population. Prevention measures should focus on ways to reduce ID hospitalizations among older AI/AN adults, particularly those living in the Southwest and Alaska regions.
The Effect of Message Type on Physician Compliance with Disease Reporting Requirements
Authors: Brissette Ian , Gelberg Kitty H. , Grey Anthony J.
Published: July 2017

Objective.

Despite the existence of mandatory reporting laws, the underreporting of disease conditions to public health authorities is widespread. This article describes an evaluation of the effects of using different appeals to promote complete and timely reporting to the New York State Occupational Lung Disease Registry (NYS OLDR).

Methods.

Three-hundred sixty-eight physicians who had not reported patients were randomly assigned to receive correspondence emphasizing either the legal obligation to report, the public health benefits of reporting, or both. Chi-square tests were used to determine if the proportion of physicians who subsequently reported patients differed by message group. Chi-square tests and the Kruskall Wallis rank sum test were used to test for differences in the completeness and timeliness of reports received from physicians in the three message groups.

Results.

Physicians receiving correspondence describing the legal obligation to report were more likely to report patients than those receiving only the benefit message, while those receiving correspondence describing the public health benefits of reporting submitted more complete reports than those receiving only the obligation message.

Conclusions.

To maximize physician reporting, it is important for public health agencies to emphasize both the legal and public health basis for reporting conditions in correspondence to physicians.
Inadequate Prenatal Care and Elevated Blood Lead Levels among Children Born in Providence, Rhode Island: A Population-Based Study
Authors: Greene Anna , Morello-Frosch Rachel , Shenassa Edmond D.
Published: July 2017

Objective.

This study was conducted to determine whether children born to mothers receiving inadequate prenatal care are at an increased risk for having an elevated blood lead level during early childhood.

Methods.

The authors conducted a population-based study of children born in Providence, Rhode Island, from 1997 to 2001 whose mothers had received adequate, intermediate, or inadequate prenatal care. The children's blood lead levels were compared between groups using bivariate and logistic regression. To understand the regulatory implications and public health impact of changing the definition of an elevated blood lead level, “elevated” was defined as 5 μg/dL, 10 μg/dL, and 15 μg/dL.

Results.

Children born to mothers who received inadequate prenatal care were at an elevated risk for having an elevated blood lead level later in life. This relationship remained statistically significant for each definition of elevated blood lead level and after controlling for other socio-economic status measures and birthweight (at 5 μg/dL, odds ratio [OR]=1.36, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.09, 1.68, p=0.006; at 10 μg/dL, OR=1.68, 95%CI 1.26, 2.24, p<0.0004; at 15 μg/dL, OR=1.83, 95% CI 1.10, 3.04, p=0.019) represent an opportune moment to identify expectant mothers living in lead-contaminated environments.

Conclusions.

Results suggest that conducting lead screening as a regular part of prenatal care provision could help identify women possibly experiencing ongoing lead exposure and help reduce or prevent exposures to their offspring.
The Contribution of Specific Causes of Death to Sex Differences in Mortality
Authors: Wong Mitchell D. , Chung Anne K. , Boscardin W. John , Li Ming , Hsieh Hsin-Ju , Ettner Susan L. , Shapiro Martin F.
Published: July 2017

Objective.

Men have higher mortality rates than women for most causes of death. This study was conducted to determine the contribution of specific causes of death to the sex difference in years of potential life lost (YPLL).

Methods.

The authors examined data from the National Health Interview Survey with linked mortality data through 1997. Using survival analysis estimates, a stochastic simulation model to simulate death events for cohorts of white, African American, and Latino adults was created.

Results.

YPLL from all causes were greater among men than women. Homicide, motor vehicle accidents, and suicide accounted for 33% of YPLL sex difference among whites, 36% among African Americans, and 52% among Latinos. For all three racial/ethnic groups, cardiovascular disease (principally ischemic heart disease) was the second largest contributor to the sex difference in YPLL (29% among whites, 23% among African Americans, and 25% among Latinos). Lung cancer was also important among whites and African Americans, accounting for 15% and 17% of the sex difference in YPLL from all causes, respectively.

Conclusions.

Ischemic heart disease, lung cancer, and traumatic deaths account for as much as three-quarters of the excess YPLL among men, suggesting that a few modifiable behaviors such as the use of tobacco, alcohol, and drugs and violence may account for much of the shorter life expectancy among men.
Smoking Prevalence among Asian Americans: Findings from the National Latino and Asian American Study (NLAAS)
Authors: Chae David H. , Gavin Amelia R. , Takeuchi David T.
Published: July 2017

Objective.

National studies suggest that the prevalence of current smoking among Asian Americans is lower than that for other racial/ethnic groups. However, these studies may have yielded inaccurate estimates because of the underrepresentation of non-English-speaking groups. Using data from the National Latino and Asian American Study (NLAAS), the authors estimated the prevalence of current and lifetime smoking among Asian Americans.

Methods.

Current and lifetime smoking status was assessed through a population-based survey administered to Asian American adults aged 18 and older.

Results.

An overall current smoking prevalence of 14.9% was found, with notable differences by gender, nativity, and other sociodemographic factors. The prevalence of current smoking was higher among foreign-born vs. U.S.-born men (24.9% vs. 15.6%), while U.S.-born women had a higher prevalence than foreign-born women (6.3% vs. 11.7%). Overall, 28.3% of Asian Americans were ever smokers (including current and former smokers), suggesting that approximately half of ever smokers cease smoking. Results indicated that some Asian American groups are more likely to initiate smoking and/or be more likely to continue smoking.

Conclusion.

Results revealed that the prevalence of current smoking exceeds that of the general U.S. population for some Asian American groups and suggest that excluding non-English-speaking Asian Americans may underestimate the prevalence of smoking among men. Findings indicate that some Asian American groups are at greater risk for initiating smoking and/or continuing smoking, and highlight the need for tailored interventions that address differential smoking patterns by gender, nativity, and other social characteristics.
The Personal Costs of Caring for a Child with a Disability: A Review of the Literature
Authors: Anderson Donna , Dumont Serge , Jacobs Philip , Azzaria Leila
Published: July 2017

This article presents a review of the literature published from 1989 to 2005 for articles that examined the economic burden incurred by families as a result of caring for a child with disabilities. The review was performed according to a comprehensive economic conceptual model developed by the authors and to the guidelines set out by Canadian Coordinating Office for Health Technology Assessment.

The analysis indicated that the burden incurred by these families can be substantial, especially among families who care for a child with a severe disability. However, the variability and the quality of methods is such that the return on investment in knowledge of costs in this area is not as high as it could have been had methodological procedures been more standardized. A comprehensive and systematic approach is suggested for future research.