Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

Availability

Open Access Thesis

Keywords

Movement, Psychology of; Speech disorders; Speech--Physiological aspects; Academic theses

Abstract

The current study investigated stop/go boundaries for speech acts (i.e. saying "uh, annul, annulment") in a speech inhibition task modeled on Slater-Hammel's (1959) experiment. Specifically, the project sought to answer the following research questions: (1) Can human speakers learn to stop a sweep hand using their voice? (2) What is the absolute (100%) inhibition threshold for "uh?" (3) What is the threshold at which one half of the spoken response for "uh," can be inhibited? Two additional studies were conducted for the additional stop targets "annul" (Williams, 2009) and "annulment" (Corbett, 2009). Self-report and informal speech-language screening assessed ten adult participants between the ages of 18-40. All participants were found to have normal respiratory function for speech, normal articulation and language ability, and no history of neuromuscular disorder. Participants used a custom computer program, which provided both the visual stimulus for the participants and the database for recording responses. Participants were trained to stop a sweep hand by using their voice. After Participants had learned the task, the experiment condition was introduced wherein the participants began using inhibition. A Goodness of Fit Chi Square was utilized on the resulting distribution revealing no significant difference between hypothesized or actual distributions, indicating that the distribution was not a chance distribution.

Year of Submission

2009

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Department

Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders

First Advisor

Carlin F. Hageman

Second Advisor

Evette Edmister

Third Advisor

James Kelly

Comments

If you are the rightful copyright holder of this thesis and wish to have it removed from the Open Access Collection, please submit a request to scholarworks@uni.edu and include clear identification of the work, preferably with URL.

Date Original

2009

Object Description

1 PDF file (55 leaves)

Language

en

File Format

application/pdf

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