The effect of talker and token variability on speech perception has engendered a great deal of research. However, most of this research has compared listener performance in multiple-talker (or variable) situations to performance in single-talker conditions. It remains unclear to what extent listeners are affected by the degree of variability within a talker, rather than simply the existence of variability (being in a multitalker environment). The present study has two goals: First, the degree of variability among speakers in their /s/ and /S/ productions was measured. Even among a relatively small pool of talkers, there was a range of speech variability: some talkers had /s/ and /S/ categories that were quite distinct from one another in terms of frication centroid and skewness, while other speakers had categories that actually overlapped one another. The second goal was to examine whether this degree of variability within a talker influenced perception. Listeners were presented with natural /s/ and /S/ tokens for identification, under ideal listening conditions, and slower response times were found for speakers whose productions were more variable than for speakers with more internal consistency in their speech. This suggests that the degree of variability, not just the existence of it, may be the more critical factor in perception.

No abstract

As a team working in a child sex abuse project, we are interested in recent relevant research; we are particularly interested in the interface between clinician and researcher, and the difficulties inherent in undertaking research as part of therapy. A recent publication (Steier, 1991) and our own clinical experience have made us aware of the extent to which the particular curiosities, or even passion of the researcher can influence the outcome of the research in ways that the researcher is often unaware of. . The conclusion of the article is that the most dysfunctional families were least likely to participate in research. We felt that this conclusion was not justified on the basis of the evidence offered. In the study, 45% of families who met inclusion criteria for the study participated in the research. Ofthe nonparticipants, 25% declined to participate; 75% were not invited to participate on the basis of the Social Worker's view of the families likely response to the invitation.The conclusion of the study, in our view, should therefore include an understanding of how the social workers made their decisions on whether or not to offer research participation to families. Mention is made of the fact that in 25% of the cases where participation was not invited, the reason was "Social workers uncertainty or resistance to research". It seems unfair to label these families dysfunctional since the only information we are given about them seems to be that their social workers had a negative attitude towards research.

Highlights• This study uses concept mapping to gather collective perspectives on DSV prevention strategies.• This study focuses on data collected across four rural Northern England towns.• Participants across four towns identified similar cluster solutions for prevention strategies.• Despite geographical similarities, towns require prevention initiatives tailored to their community.• Concept mapping can be used as an effective assessment tool to capture variations within communities.

A primary issue in speech perception is the apparent lack of invariance between the acoustic information in a signal and the listeners perception. Different intended phonemes may be produced with identical acoustic values. Previously, we examined fricative centroids and frication peaks for over 100 utterances beginning with /s/ and /∫/ from each of 20 different speakers, and found substantial overlap across talkers. In the present study, we examine the effect of this overlap on perception. Listeners in a phoneme identification task heard natural productions of /s/ and /∫/ syllables from speakers with either little or great overlap between categories. Although labeling accuracy was near ceiling, effects were found in listeners’ reaction times. Listeners needed more time to interpret the speech of talkers who had substantial overlap in their fricative centroids, even when these talkers showed no overlap in their frication peaks. Listeners also had slower reaction times for talkers with overlap in their frication peaks, but not their centroids. This suggests that category overlap has measureable consequences to perception, and that peaks and centroids are sensitive to different aspects of the speech signal, both of which are perceptually impotant to listeners. [Work supported by NIDCD Grant R01-DC00219 to SUNY at Buffalo.]