Experimental manipulation of continuous speech in schizophrenic patients.

A method was developed for obtaining extended continuous speech samples from hospitalized schizophrenics. 1 group was reinforced for self-referred affect statements, 1 group for speech in general, and 1 group served as a no-reinforcement control. The effect of reinforcement proved specific to the response class reinforced, whether narrow (self-referred affect statements) or more general (total speech output). The conditioning process progresses from broad classes to the particular one on which reinforcement is contingent. The problem of respons-class identification and other implications of the findings are discussed. (36 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Changes in the language of a schizophrenic patient during psychotherapy.

A method of linguistic analysis (Bousfield et al, 1958) is applied to the speech of a schizophrenic patient to demonstrate the changes that have occurred in the course of psychotherapy. The analysis showed that as the patient's behavior became less disorganized, so did his speech; however, the content of his speech revealed constriction of ideation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

An autobiography of a schizophrenic experience.

This article is based on an unpublished autobiography written in the spring of 1951, shortly after the author returned home from the second of three episodes of her schizophrenic experience. She recounts in some detail her background and the events leading up to her illness. In writing of her schizophrenic episode, she describes the onset stage; the formation of the delusional system; feelings of anger, aggression, fear, and sympathy; her religious identifications and death fantasies; symbolism and inspirations; and, her chief personality changes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

WAIS "analytic index" and rehospitalization of schizophrenic servicemen.

Presents an analysis of WAIS protocols of 98 servicemen obtained 1 wk. prior to hospital discharge. All Ss had experienced an acute schizophrenic episode and had recovered sufficiently to be judged capable of returning to full duty. For 6 mo. following their return to duty, they were intensively studied. The hypothesis that the Ss who were rehospitalized would show a lower mean "analytic index," as defined by Witkin, Dyk, Faterson, Goodenough, and Karp, than those who successfully reintegrated was confirmed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A technique for the study of psychodynamic relationships: The effects of subliminally presented aggressive stimuli on the production of pathological thinking in a schizophrenic population.

An investigation of the effects of subliminally presented aggressive stimuli on thought processes. 32 hospitalized male schizophrenics were seen for an experimental and control session in a balanced design. Inkblot responses elicited after the exposure of aggression-related and neutral stimuli were scored blindly according to the Holt Primary Process Manual. As predicted, there were significantly more manifestations of pathological thinking after the aggressive stimuli. It was concluded from this finding, together with other clinically significant changes after the experimental stimuli, that the technique described has general applicability for the study of psychodynamic relationships. (23 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A schizophrenic child and his mother.

The case of a five-year-old schizophrenic child is presented together with his background. "The mother's lack of psychological sophistication, her cooperative attitude, and the relative youth of the child permit a rather clear view of some of the dynamics which might have entered into the genesis of the disorder." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Hypnotic susceptibility of schizophrenic patients.

Clinical lore and much of the previous literature has maintained that schizophrenics are far less susceptible to hypnosis than are normals. A few studies have reported success with hypnotizing schizophrenics, but have lacked a methodology which would permit comparison with normal Ss to be made. In this study, 26 Ss with a hospital diagnosis of schizophrenia were given the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale—a verbatim induction technique and rating scale for which data on a normal, standardization group is available. The Ss gave results much like the normal group. Reasons for the difference between this and previous findings are discussed, including the hypothesis that previous workers found schizophrenics to be different in hypnotizability from normals because they treated them differently than they would normals. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Shape constancy in schizophrenic patients.

Shape constancy in visual perception of schizophrenic patients was studied. 40 chronic schizophrenic, 40 acute schizophrenic, 40 nonschizophrenic mental patients, and 40 normal controls were used as Ss. Ss matched the shape of a standard object (circle) inclined at an angle. 2 angles of inclination, 30° and 60°, were used. It was found that shape constancy was lower in schizophrenic patients than in controls when the stimulus object was inclined 60° from the horizontal plane. When the angle of inclination was 30° there was no difference between the groups. The chronic schizophrenic patients displayed greater response variability than the other groups. The relation of these findings to the theory of assimilation of percepts to the perceptual schemata in schizophrenic patients was discussed. (23 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Some determinants of persistence in chronic schizophrenic subjects.

This investigation of persistence in schizophrenics on tasks differing in complexity and interest under ego-involved and task-oriented conditions utilized 3 groups of male schizophrenics: 30 well-adjusted and 30 poorly-adjusted out-patients, and 30 regressed hospitalized patients. Each S worked at 1 of 3 tasks representing low, moderate, and high degrees of interest and complexity. ? of each group received ego-involved and ? received task-oriented instructions. Outpatient schizozphrenics were clearly superior to hospitalized patients in persistence. Persistence was greater under ego-involved than under task-oriented conditions, regardless of task or level of psychopathology, but there was no difference in persistence scores across tasks. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effect of enriched input on schizophrenic abstraction.

Closed ward, openward, and former schizophrenic patients were compared with nonschizophrenic patients. Ss gave abstract interpretations for single proverbs and for sets of 3 proverbs, the proverb sets providing an enriched input condition. Schizophrenics with mild and medium degrees of psychosis showed improvement in abstract responses with enriched input. Nonschizophrenic and severely schizophrenic Ss showed no improvement. When input was adequate, deficit in abstract responses disappeared entirely for the mildly schizophrenic Ss. Severely schizophrenic Ss showed deficit on all tests. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Generalization of perceptual learning of vocoded speech.

Recent work demonstrates that learning to understand noise-vocoded (NV) speech alters sublexical perceptual processes but is enhanced by the simultaneous provision of higher-level, phonological, but not lexical content (Hervais-Adelman, Davis, Johnsrude, & Carlyon, 2008), consistent with top-down learning (Davis, Johnsrude, Hervais-Adelman, Taylor, & McGettigan, 2005; Hervais-Adelman et al., 2008). Here, we investigate whether training listeners with specific types of NV speech improves intelligibility of vocoded speech with different acoustic characteristics. Transfer of perceptual learning would provide evidence for abstraction from variable properties of the speech input. In Experiment 1, we demonstrate that learning of NV speech in one frequency region generalizes to an untrained frequency region. In Experiment 2, we assessed generalization among three carrier signals used to create NV speech: noise bands, pulse trains, and sine waves. Stimuli created using these three carriers possess the same slow, time-varying amplitude information and are equated for na?ve intelligibility but differ in their temporal fine structure. Perceptual learning generalized partially, but not completely, among different carrier signals. These results delimit the functional and neural locus of perceptual learning of vocoded speech. Generalization across frequency regions suggests that learning occurs at a stage of processing at which some abstraction from the physical signal has occurred, while incomplete transfer across carriers indicates that learning occurs at a stage of processing that is sensitive to acoustic features critical for speech perception (e.g., noise, periodicity). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The varieties of speech to young children.

This article examines caregiver speech to young children. The authors obtained several measures of the speech used to children during early language development (14-30 months). For all measures, they found substantial variation across individuals and subgroups. Speech patterns vary with caregiver education, and the differences are maintained over time. While there are distinct levels of complexity for different caregivers, there is a common pattern of increase across age within the range that characterizes each educational group. Thus, caregiver speech exhibits both long-standing patterns of linguistic behavior and adjustment for the interlocutor. This information about the variability of speech by individual caregivers provides a framework for systematic study of the role of input in language acquisition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The relationship of age and privilege status to reaction time indices of schizophrenic motivation.

An experiment designed to investigate the relationship of age and ground privilege status to reaction time indices of biological, social and anxiety motivation in schizophrenic patients. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Intrusion of associative responses into schizophrenic conceptual performance.

One normal and one schizophrenic group, each consisting of 32 adult males, were required to sort cards bearing the name of a common object with 3 guide-card words—one sharing a concept with the sorting-card word, one with an associate connection to it, and one which was irrelevant. The schizophrenics were expected to make more associative errors than the normals. The results indicated that both difficulty in forming concepts and susceptibility to associative distraction are in part responsible for the fact that schizophrenics show more associative intrusions than do normals. 23 references. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Some parameters of the conditioning of verbal affect responses in schizophrenic subjects.

The study explored the effect of verbal reinforcement procedures with a sample of hospitalized schizophrenics. Comparisons were made of the reinforcement effect when it was given at the beginning vs. in the middle of a 30-min. interview. No differential reinforcement effect in terms of timing was found. Moreover, for verbal reinforcement per se to be effective, a number of reinforcements were necessary. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Lexical selection in bilingual speech production does not involve language suppression.

The "hard problem" in bilingual lexical access arises when translation-equivalent lexical representations are activated to roughly equal levels and, thus, compete equally for lexical selection. The language suppression hypothesis (D. W. Green, 1998) solves this hard problem through the suppression of lexical representations in the nontarget language. Following from this proposal is the prediction that lexical selection should take longer on a language switch trial because the to-be-selected representation was just suppressed on the previous trial. Inconsistent with this prediction, participants took no longer to name pictures in their dominant language on language switch trials than they did on nonswitch trials. These findings indicate that nontarget lexical representations are not suppressed. The authors suggest that these results undermine the viability of the language suppression hypothesis as a possible solution to the hard problem in bilingual lexical access. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Linguistic determinism and the part of speech.

"Nouns used by young English-speaking children were more reliably the names of things and their verbs more reliably the names of actions than… the nouns and verbs used by English-speaking adults. It was shown experimentally that young English-speaking children take the part-of-speech membership of a new word as a clue to the meaning of the word. In this way, they make use of the semantic distinctiveness of the parts of speech… . Differences between languages in their parts of speech may be diagnostic of differences in the cognitive psychologies of those who use languages." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Patterns of role dominance and conflict in parents of schizophrenic patients.

By making observations of husband-wife interaction in an experimental setting, ratings of dominance of one parent over the other and degree of conflict could be obtained directly rather than inferred. Such ratings could be compared to data regarding the status of their children. Schizophrenic children with good and poor premorbid adjustment were compared with a comparable group of children hospitalized for tuberculosis. Good premorbids and controls were found to be from paternal-dominated families whereas poor premorbids came from maternal-dominated families. Parents of schizophrenics displayed more conflicts than those of the controls. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognitive control factors in speech perception at 11 months.

The development of speech perception during the 1st year reflects increasing attunement to native language features, but the mechanisms underlying this development are not completely understood. One previous study linked reductions in nonnative speech discrimination to performance on nonlinguistic tasks, whereas other studies have shown associations between speech perception and vocabulary growth. The present study examined relationships among these abilities in 11-month-old infants using a conditioned head-turn test of native and nonnative speech sound discrimination, nonlinguistic object-retrieval tasks requiring attention and inhibitory control, and the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (L. Fenson et al., 1993). Native speech discrimination was positively linked to receptive vocabulary size but not to the cognitive control tasks, whereas nonnative speech discrimination was negatively linked to cognitive control scores but not to vocabulary size. Speech discrimination, vocabulary size, and cognitive control scores were not associated with more general cognitive measures. These results suggest specific relationships between domain-general inhibitory control processes and the ability to ignore variation in speech that is irrelevant to the native language and between the development of native language speech perception and vocabulary. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Anxiety and ego strength as predictors of response in schizophrenic patients.

Hypotheses, derived from existing psychological formulations of schizophrenia, that degree of manifest anxiety and ego strength would be positively related to response to treatment were examined in a sample of 50 male and 50 female first admission schizophrenics. Scales (Baron, 1953a; Taylor, 1953) purported to assess these variables did not predict treatment outcome for the combined groups. However, in analyses broken down by sex both predictors were significantly related to outcome criteria, but in consistently opposite directions for men and women. The markedly different results for men and women are interpreted in terms of the sex-role appropriateness of the behavior sampled by the predictor measures. (27 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)