Past studies have shown that stuttering is eliminated when speech is synchronized with a metronomic beat, but the speech sounds artificial. The present study investigated the effect of increasing the duration of these individual stimulus beats with the stimulus-off period constant at 1 sec. When subjects were instructed to speak during the stimulus-on period, stuttering was an inverse function of stimulus duration, indicating that the known metronome effect on stuttering is one point on a continuum of effective rhythm procedures. The "naturalness" of speech increased as the stimulus duration increased up to durations of about 2 sec, and then decreased. At optimal values, stuttering was greatly reduced and naturalness and rapidity of speech were retained. These optimal values effectively controlled stuttering in a field test that used two types of specially designed portable instruments, one of which produced a tactual stimulus and the other an auditory stimulus.

The current conception of the employment process is that positions become available, are publicized, and are filled by the most qualified job seekers. An alternative conception is proposed that social factors play a major role in the process and that job finding can be analyzed as an exchange of social reinforcers in which the first behavioral step is to locate job openings. A questionnaire survey of 120 jobs found that two‐thirds of the job leads came from friends or relatives who: (1) usually knew of a specific opening (63%); (2) were themselves employed by the hiring firm (71%); and (3) actively influenced the hiring process (53%). An experimental evaluation was made of an “Information‐Reward” advertisement procedure for motivating community residents to report unpublicized openings. It was found that the Information‐Reward procedure produced 10 times as many job leads and eight times as many placements as a no‐reward control advertisement. These findings represent a first step toward a much needed technology of job finding that is based on experimental evidence and support the notion that the employment process depends on factors unrelated to work skills.

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The present study attempted to determine how a rhythmic beat affects ongoing behavior. A regular stimulus beat was presented to normal subjects who had been instructed to push a bar from side to side. Other subjects had been instructed to emit a vocal response. The individual vocal and motor responses became synchronized with the individual beats of the rhythm. The time between stimulus beats determined the modal interresponse time. These results indicate a synchronization effect: ongoing behavior tends to become synchronized with an ongoing stimulus rhythm. An attempt was made to apply these findings to the problem of stuttering, which can be considered as a disturbance of the natural rhythm of speech. Stutterers were instructed to synchronize their speech with a simple regular beat presented to them tactually by a portable apparatus. The result was a reduction of 90% or more of the stuttering for each subject during the period of synchronization. This effect endured for extended periods of spontaneous speech as well as for reading aloud and was found to be attributable to the rhythmic nature of the stimulus and not to other factors. EXPERIMENT I: CONTROL OF SIMPLEMOTOR AND VOCAL RESPONSES BY RHYTHM Rhythmic stimuli are believed to exert substantial behavioral influence, as evidenced by the extensive natural use of music. Yet, the basis of this control by music remains unexplained. One known property of music is that when music is contingent upon a response it can be a reinforcer, as shown by Barrett's (1962) punishment of tics by timeout from music and by Ayllon and Azrin's (1965Azrin's ( , 1968aAzrin's ( , 1968b Weidenfeller, 1962Weidenfeller, , 1963Ellis and Brighouse, 1952). Also, the use of music therapy for mental patients seems to be based on the assumption that music affects the general emotional state. Non-contingent music has often been reported as increasing the level of ongoing behaviors, but these reports are often conflicting (see review by Uhrbrock, 1961). Even when a complex musical sound pattern affects ongoing behavior, the question remains as to which aspect of the complex was responsible. The present study attempted a more analytic study of the effect of rhythm by investigating whether a simple regular beat influenced ongoing behavior. The procedure differed from previous studies of rhythm in that the response was a simple and discrete movement of a bar or a simple vocal response, rather than a complex behavioral sequence; similarly, the rhythmic stimulus was a fixed beat rather than a complex musical pattern. The simple nature of the response and the stimulus permitted the evaluation of any point-to-point correspondence in time between them and the eval-283 1968, 1.,283-295 NUMBER 4 (WINTER 1968)