Applied Psychometrics Laboratory

1) Arousal and Stuttering Study (Psychophys)
2) Executive Functioning Study
3) Speed Dating Study
4) Misattribution Study
5) Processing Fluency and Perceptions of Truth

Guntupalli, Everhart, Kalinowski, Nanjundeswaran and Saltuklaroglu found an increase in skin conductance and lower mean heart rate when participants view persons who stutter compared to persons who do not stutter (2007).  We will be measuring participants' physiological responses to a series of videos using the following apparatuses: electromyograph (EMG), electrocardiogram (EKG) and galvanic skin response (GSR).  In addition to measuring arousal, we will be measuring recall to ascertain if there is a difference in recall in hearing stories told by persons who stutter compared to persons who do not stutter. Watch us hook up Dr. Ainsworth HERE!  

The purpose of this research is to compare if any, differences in executive functioning between people who stutter (PWS), people who used to stutter (PWUS), and people who do not stutter (PWNS). Previous studies have shown that participants who stutter demonstrated a significant increase in disfluency when a verbal component was involved in the task (Stroop test) compared to non-stutterers (Bosshardt, 2009; Subramanian & Yairi, 2005). In addition, preliminary results from a previous study using the (WCST) Wisconsin Card Sorting Task (Grant & Berg, 1981) showed that there were no differences between stutterers and non-stutterers, however, stutterers still self-reported having perceived cognitive deficits (Ainsworth, 2010). We hypothesize that PWS will perform significantly worse than PWNS on a range of cognitive tasks. 

We are conducting this study under the assumption that stuttering does cause arousal in fluent listeners. This assumption is suggested by past research done in APL, specifically the Dating Video Study. Our goal is for a fluent listener to misattribute his/her feelings of arousal caused by the PWS to the non-PWS. Keep in mind that arousal does not only increase positive emotions it also increases negative emotions as well.

This study will try to isolate processing fluency (the ease of processing information) for listeners of people who stutter. It is hypothesized that since stuttering isdisfluent speech, it will be processed at a perceptual level disfluently, leading to lower judgments of the target (e.g., perceptions of truth). Our objective is to determine if listeners rate people who stutter as less truthful because of their difficulty in processing their speech.