The present study attempted to generate and evaluate a taxonomy of the situations and tasks most likely to lead deviant children to experience social difficulties. In Study 1, elementary school teachers and clinicians were asked to notice such situations as they occurred. The outcome was a 44-item Taxonomy of Problematic Social Situations for Children. This survey was administered to teachers of 45 socially rejected children and 39 adaptive children. The survey was found to have high internal consistency and high test-retest reliability. Six situation types emerged as factors in analyses: Peer Group Entry; Response to Peer Provocations; Response to Failure; Response to Success; Social Expectations; and Teacher Expectations. Teachers rated the rejected group as having more problems than the adaptive group in each situation, but particularly in Response to Peer Provocations and Teacher Expectations. In Study 2, 15 items within the six factors were presented in hypothetical format to 39 clinic-referred rejected aggressive children and 34 adaptive children, who were asked to role-play their responses. The items, in particular the provocation items, again differentiated the two groups. Sex and age differences were also found. The usefulness of this taxonomy in a three-step model of clinical assessment is proposed.

The present study examined the plasticity of the human perceptual system by means of laboratory training procedures designed to modify the perception of the voicing dimension in synthetic speech stimuli. Although the results of earlier laboratory training studies have been ambiguous, recently Pisoni, Aslin, Perey, and Hennessy (1982) have succeeded in altering the perception of labial stop consonants from a two-way contrast in voicing to a three-way contrast. The present study extended these initial results by demonstrating that experience gained from discrimination training on one place of articulation (e.g., labial) can be transferred to another place of articulation (e.g., alveolar) without any additional training on the specific test stimuli. Quantitative analyses of the identification functions showed that the new perceptual categories were stable and displayed well-defined labeling boundaries between categories. Taken together with the earlier findings, these results imply a greater degree of plasticity in the adult speech processing system than has generally been acknowledged in past studies. 323This report is concerned with the perceptual categorization of human speech sounds, particularly the categorization of the voicing dimension in stop consonants. The voicing dimension has been studied extensively in recent years in an attempt to characterize the potential interactions between genetic and environmental influ- Ip, t, and kl are exemplars of long-lag stops; fb, d, and

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Phoneme monitoring and word monitoring are two experimental tasks that have frequently been used to assess the processing of fluent speech. Each task is purported to provide an "online" measure of the comprehension process, and each requires listeners to pay conscious attention to some aspect or property of the sound structure of the speech signal. The present study is primarily a methodological one directed at the following question: Does the allocation of processing resources for conscious analysis of the sound structure of the speech signal affect ongoing comprehension processes or the ultimate level of understanding achieved for the content of the linguistic message? Our subjects listened to spoken stories. Then, to measure their comprehension, they answered multiple-choice questions about each story. During some stories, they were required to detect a specific phoneme; during other stories, they were required to detect a specific word; during still other stories, they were not required to monitor the utterance for any target. The monitoring results replicated earlier findings showing longer detection latencies for phoneme monitoring than for word monitoring. Somewhat surprisingly, the ancillary phoneme-and word-monitoring tasks did not adversely affect overall comprehension performance. This result undermines the specific criticism that on-line monitoring paradigms of this kind should not be used to study spoken language understanding because these tasks interfere with normal comprehension.

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