Biomedical subjects

I C Courtright

Publications and source records attributed to I C Courtright.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed1983

The perception of nonverbal vocal cues of emotional meaning by language-disordered and normal children.

The purpose of this study was to compare language-disordered and normal children in terms of their ability to interpret emotional meaning from the vocal cues of an adult speaker. The findings indicated that language-disordered children were less accurate in identifying vocal cues of emotion than were normal children, although their pattern of errors was not significantly different. These findings are discussed in terms of Lubert's (1981) "acoustic feature theory" of language impairment, and suggestions for future research are advanced.

Child↗

PubMed1979

Imitative modeling as a language intervention strategy: the effects of two mediating variables.

Previous research has indicated that language intervention strategies which stress the learning of abstract grammatical rules are more successful than those which emphasize specific stimulus-response associations. Accordingly, this study experimentally compared two such strategies (imitative modeling versus mimicry) to determine their relative effectiveness in teaching language-disordered children rules which they previously lacked. Moreover, two additional variables, reinforcement and whether the modeled examples originated with the clinician or with a separate, third-person model, were examined to determine their influence on the modeling process. The results suggest that modeling strategies were superior to mimicry, thereby replicating the earlier results of Courtright and Courtright (1976). In addition, it was found that neither reinforcement nor third-person models significantly increased the teaching effectiveness of modeling techniques. These results are discussed in terms of their pragmatic implications for practicing speech clinicians.

Child↗

PubMed1976

Imitative modeling as a theoretical base for instructing language-disordered children.

A modification of Bandura's social learning theory (imitative modeling) was employed as a theoretical base for language instruction. This approach was experimentally compared to an alternative technique which required the subject to literally match each stimulus statement made by che clinician (mimicry). The results support the prediction that modeling is more effective in teaching the subject the appropriate grammatical rule, which he or she initially lacked. Moreover, subjects in the modeling condition exhibited both greater retention of the rule and a more successful generalization of it to novel contexts. The results are explained in terms of an "interference hypothesis," which suggests that a client's overt verbalization may interfere with the cognitive processing necessary to learn an abstract language rule.

Child↗