Abstract Voluntary Stuttering and the Covert Stutterer Erin Jo Stergiou, M.A. The University of Texas at Austin, 2014 Supervisor: Courtney T. Byrd The purpose of the present study was to investigate the use of voluntary stuttering among individuals who self-identify as covert stutterers. Specifically, this study explored the perceived thoughts and feelings of covert stutterers regarding the impact of this strategy on their speech and on their lives overall. Further, the present study touches on the seemingly paradoxical relationship of initial discomfort but greater benefit that covert stutterers may perceive with the use of voluntary stuttering. Data for this research was compiled from an on-line survey distributed to members of the National Stuttering Association listserv and clients of the University of Texas Speech and Hearing Center. Results from this study suggest that covert stutterers presented with less aversion towards voluntary stuttering than had been predicted. Furthermore, present data points to the general lack of use by many participants as one of the potential reasons for their expressed neutrality regarding this tool. The results from this study, however, should be considered in light of the large, but potentially homogenous pool of participants reached via survey distribution methods. / text

This study investigated whether perceptual fluency could affect duration judgments. Fluency refers to levels of subjective ease, in which stimuli can be processed (Lanska, Olds, & Westerman, 2014). The study was conducted with experimental within group factorial design. Visual stimuli were selected from Snodgrass and Vanderwarts (1980) standardized set of 260 pictures. Pairs were made with low and high levels of complexity. Duration was about 1000 milliseconds with .10 variations. 1/3 of pairs were without variation. Participants were asked to judge which image was presented for longest time. Total amount of participants was 37. Main hypothesis was that low levels of complexity would be judged, to a greater frequency, as having been presented for longer duration. Observed mean (M= 20.27, SD = 2.90) was slightly lower than level of chance (M = 21) and the difference was non significant, t(36) = -1.53, p > .13. The null hypothesis was not rejected.

Five experiments are presented in this thesis. They investigate the impact of the interpreter's language exposure on the interpreter's fluency in simultaneous interpreting. The measurement of the interpreter's fluency involves a quantitative procedure developed by Kirsner and his colleagues (2002). The procedure is based on computer-assisted analyses of pause and speech segment durations and associated variables. The quantitative measures are employed to determine whether or not different levels of the language exposure influence fluency in simultaneous interpreting. The impact of the interpreter's language exposure is elaborated upon within the framework of dynamic systems theory. Experiment 1 is a pilot case study investigating the applicability of the methodology developed by Kirsner and his colleagues (2002, 2005) to the research in fluency in simultaneous interpreting. In Experiments 2-5 this methodology is extended to investigate the impact of the participants' language exposure on fluency in simultaneous interpreting involving various language pair combinations. Experiment 2 investigates the interpreter students' exposure to their third working language, Norwegian. It has been found that the participant's fluency in the experimental tasks critically depends on the amount of out-of-classroom language exposure, involving the language exposure to Swedish, a language typologically closely related to Norwegian. Experiment 3 investigates the impact of the interpreter students' language exposure gained during the stay abroad in Germany on their fluency in interpretation from/into German. Significant gains in fluency due to the stay abroad have been found between the groups of participants and their respective controls who studied German at their respective home universities. Experiments 4 and 5 explore the impact of the on-going language exposure to the interpreter's second language in the conditions of discontinuity in practicing simultaneous interpreting. The participants with the language pair combinations Finnish/Swedish (experiment 4) and English/Russian (experiment 5) have discontinued practicing simultaneous interpreting, yet enjoy a continuous exposure to their working languages. The participants have exhibited superior fluency measures compared to their respective controls (beginner and advanced students), and inferior fluency measures compared to the control group of professional interpreters. Data analysis of all the participants under all experimental conditions have not yielded any pause duration distributions specific to simultaneous interpreting.

Flow is a psychological state that is considered to be an ‘optimal experience.’ Given its power in eliciting positive experiences, flow has been suggested to be an important topic for future research. However, the literature lacks a nuanced understanding of flow and it has yet to expand beyond the online context in consumer behavior research. This dissertation addresses these related problems through two essays. The first essay addresses the underlying problem by helping understand the process of entering flow. I demonstrate how the two component parts of flow- fluency and absorption, combine to elicit flow. Across three studies I demonstrate that fluency-related aspects of an experience facilitate the absorption-related experiences, which mediate perceptions of being in flow overall. In Study 1 I demonstrate that the perceived fluency of listening to a song increases absorption which mediates perceptions of being in flow. In Study 2 I replicate the flow process model in the context of reading. Study 3 is dedicated to shutting down the relationship between fluency and absorption. I shut down the relationship between fluency and absorption by having people work on an easy Sudoku puzzle. The second essay builds from the findings of the first to facilitate flow in product trials and demonstrate the positive consequences it has for product attitudes and the desire to engage with the products again. I use three studies to achieve these goals. In Study 1 I demonstrate that flow experienced in the trial of a rowing machine mediates the desire to engage with the rowing machine again. In Study 2, I demonstrate that manipulating curiosity before the trial of an augmented reality game facilitates flow while playing the game. In Study 2 I also demonstrate that flow mediates an increase in attitudes towards the game and the desire to play the game again. In Study 3 I demonstrate that the relationship between curiosity and flow is moderated by the valence of information that elicits curiosity. Again, flow mediated the desire to listen to the song again in the future. / May 2017

This manuscript synthesizes the importance of the alphabetic principles of reading, building blocks of teaching reading, indicators of early reading success, and curriculum-based measures (CBM) within the Response to Intervention (RtI) process from empirical research. A review of the literature reflects contrasting views on which specific pre-reading skill is most predictive of word reading success toward the end of kindergarten and the important role of CBM in such an analysis. Therefore, my research questions analyzed (a) the correlations between letter naming, letter sounds, phonemic segmentation, and word reading fluency in kindergarten; (b) the relative predictive relation of letter names, letter sounds, and phonemic segmentation measures to word reading fluency for kindergarten students; and, (c) the relation of non-academic variables of special education status, English language learner status, attendance, free-and-reduced-meals, and NonWhite Race to word reading fluency in kindergarten. Correlation results indicated the correlation between winter word reading fluency and spring word reading fluency in kindergarten was r = .82, spring word reading and fall letter sounds was r = .57, spring word reading and winter letter sounds was r = .66, and spring word reading and spring letter sounds was r =.58. All the non-academic variables weakly correlated to spring word reading, with the exception of fall attendance percentage showing a negative to low correlation range (-0.15 to 0.11). In addition, regression results indicated that Winter Word Reading Fluency (Winter WRF) (β = .64) was predictive of Spring Word Reading. Spring Letter Sounds (Spring LS) (β = .29) also were predictive of Spring Word Reading as was Fall Letter Sounds (Fall LS) (β = .11). These results frame practical implications for reading instruction that suggest ways in which schools and districts to think about staffing, instruction, and schedules to better meet student needs in preparation for state-mandated all-day kindergarten in the fall of 2017 and beyond.

Parkinson's disease (PD) is the 14th leading cause of the death in the United States. There is a strong relationship between cognitive decline, subsequent dementia, and mortality in PD. Cognitive reserve contributes to the maintenance of cognitive functioning in old age. However, the importance of cognitive reserve in the clinical course of PD is largely unknown. The current study examined cognitive and psychosocial parameters and their effect on survival in PD. It was proposed that cognitive factors (most specifically, higher semantic fluency) and psychosocial factors (i.e., higher educational/occupational attainment, absence of threshold level depressive symptomatology, absence of a personal/familial psychiatric history, and having a spouse/life partner) will predict increased post-onset survival in PD. After obtaining informed consent, 192 PD participants underwent a 3-hour comprehensive neuropsychological evaluation, neurological examination, and interview. Results from a multivariate Cox proportional hazards model indicated that semantic fluency is predictive of post-onset survival in PD, independent of age of onset, disease duration at examination, gender, years of education, and disease stage. The present study did not find a relationship between psychosocial factors and post-onset survival in PD. These findings indicate that a brief assessment of semantic fluency, able to be obtained in a clinic in less than five minutes, may be a useful prognostic indicator of post-onset survival in PD.

Fluency of processing – the ease with which one extracts information from stimuli – affects a variety of cognitive processes over and above the influence of declarative content. Although this influence has been extensively demonstrated in a variety of different domains (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009), there are virtually no studies exploring this effect with auditory material. Moreover, although research on modality differences suggests that people process auditory information differently than they process visual or written information (Conway & Gathercole, 1987; Markman, Taylor & Gentner, 2007), there are no studies that directly compare the effects of processing fluency on judgments across different modalities. The current dissertation reports two sets of studies, one investigating the effects of processing fluency on cognitive judgments in the auditory modality, and a second exploring cross-modal differences in processing fluency. The first set of studies showed that although foreign-accented speech is more difficult to process, this disfluency does not affect cognitive judgments. In the second set of studies, two experiments show that disfluency in processing affects judgments of truth (Experiment 1) and the intention to purchase a product (Experiment 2) only with written – non-verbal – material. Experiment 3 investigates one possible explanation for the limited influence of processing fluency in speech: because people tend to focus on conceptual information over low-level acoustic information when processing language (Lahiri & Marslen-Wilson, 1991; Gow & Gordon, 1995; Mattys, White & Melhorn, 2005; Norris, McQueen & Cutler, 1995), distortions to the superficial features of the speech signal is likely to have limited impact on how people process the conceptual content. In Experiment 3 participants are primed to attend to the superficial features of foreign-accented speech. The results showed that when people are primed to attend to features that make foreign-accented speech difficult, non-native speech has an impact on subsequent judgments of truth. Overall, the studies presented here show that listeners can extract content from speech, even when it is distorted. They also show that when attention is directed to low-level acoustic features of speech, processing fluency effects becomes apparent. / text

Processing fluency describes the assessment of how easy a stimulus is to cognitively process, an assessment which can be mistakenly applied to judgments of other aspects of the stimulus. This dissertation introduces a novel approach to understanding the development of impressions from online profiles by incorporating the role of processing fluency in interpersonal judgments based on a social networking profile. 195 participants (155 females) were asked to view the "about me" section of a social networking profile, which had been manipulated according to one of three fluency conditions to be harder or easier to process. Participants completed scales assessing liking, similarity, trust, and compatibility, and their disclosure was measured in an open-response item. Confirming expectations based on the processing fluency literature, each of these variables was increased in the high fluency profile condition. No differences in these variables were found between the low fluency conditions and a control condition, and analysis revealed that the manipulations intended to lower fluency may have been too salient to participants. Broadly, this study shows that processing fluency can influence impression formation from online profiles across a number of meaningful relational variables. Enhancing processing ease may allow online interactants a relational "jump-start," increasing liking, perceptions of similarity, trust, compatibility, and disclosure. These findings hold important implications for the role of processing fluency in computer-mediated communication and for models of online relationship development. / text

Tests of verbal fluency are presumed to measure executive dysfunction yet in practice are sensitive to brain damage <i>per se</i>, and the <i>comparability</i> of fluency based on phonemic and semantic criteria has been questioned.  Relative to healthy controls, the effect size for each type of fluency was quantified for patients with focal cortical lesions, and using the random effects meta-analytic model, mean effects calculated for sub-groups stratified according to lesion location and laterality. Focal frontal patients were comparably impaired on both measures (<i>rs</i> = .48 and .47 respectively), but semantic fluency was relatively more dependent on temporal structures (.63), and associated with a deficit substantially in excess of the corresponding phonemic fluency deficit (.47).  Thus, whilst both types of fluency place comparable demands on executive processes, semantic fluency is relatively more dependent on semantic memory.  Phonemic fluency deficits qualified as <i>differential </i>deficits (i.e. they exceeded the averaged performance deficit across a range of other cognitive tasks) for frontal, but <i>not </i>non-frontal or specifically, temporal patients.  Fluency deficits were then quantified for patients with Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), dementia of the Alzheimer’s type (DAT), schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disease (PD) and depression.  AS for frontal patients TBI was associated with comparable phonemic and semantic fluency deficits (<i>rs =</i> .46 and .43 respectively), and for moderate and severe injuries these deficits were differential deficits.  For patients with DAT, schizophrenia and depression there was evidence of generalised cognitive dysfunction, but for each disorder semantic fluency was more impaired than phonemic fluency.  However, <i>differential </i>deficits on tests of semantic memory only emerged when there were also substantial demands on effortful retrieval and/or cognitive speed.  Finally, both demented and non-demented PD patients were also more impaired on semantic relative to phonemic fluency.  However, semantic memory was impaired even when demands on effortful retrieval and cognitive speed were minimal.

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