Norman J. Lass

• Ph.D.
• Professor at West Virginia University

An extensive Internet search was conducted to obtain pre-admission information and acceptance statistics from 260 graduate programmes in speech-language pathology accredited by the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) in the United States. ASHA is the national professional, scientific and credentialing association for members and aff...

Purpose: Low-tech methods are frequently used for assessment of resonance disorders and nasal emission. These methods have a long history and include the air paddle, feeling the sides of the nose, listening tubes, the mirror test, nasal olives, nose pinching, Oral and Nasal Listeners, the See Scape, stethoscope, and straws. The purpose of this pape...

The purpose of this study was to examine the use of high-frequency information for making gender identity judgments from high-pass filtered vowel segments produced by adult speakers. Specifically, the effect of removing lower-frequency spectral detail (i.e., F3 and below) from vowel segments via high-pass filtering was evaluated. Thirty listeners (...

Past studies have shown that listeners can distinguish most African American and European American voices, but how they do so is poorly understood. Three experiments were designed to investigate this problem. Recordings of African American and European American college students performing various reading tasks were used as the basis for stimuli in...

A legal amount, or the word amount, is defined as the expression of a numerical value into words. It is used mostly in monetary documents. Thai legal amounts consist of a set of 17 words of 25 characters. This paper's objective is to develop a system to recognize Thai handwriting legal amounts. The strategies to improve the character recognition ra...

Thai is a monosyllabic, tonal language that makes use of tone to convey lexical information about the meaning of a syllable. Thai has five distinctive tones, and each tone is well represented by a single F0 contour pattern. In general, a Thai syllable with a different tone has a different lexical meaning. Thus, to completely recognize a spoken Thai...

Thai is a monosyllabic tonal language that uses tone to convey lexical information about the meaning of a syllable. Thus to completely recognize a spoken Thai syllable, a speech recognition system not only has to recognize a base syllable but also must correctly identify a tone. Hence, tone classification of Thai speech is an essential part of a Th...

The purpose of the present study was to determine what relates most closely to the degree of perceived foreign accent in the English speech of native Spanish speakers: intonation, vowel length, stress, voice onset time (VOT), or segmental accuracy. Nineteen native English speaking listeners rated speech samples from 7 native English speakers and 15...

A master tape containing the randomized recordings of 20 Hispanic-, Asian-, and Arabic-accented English speakers reading a standard prose passage was presented to a group of 22 native English-speaking listeners who participated in two listening sessions. In the first session they were asked to use a 5-point listening preference rating scale. In the...

A questionnaire on nasopharyngoscopy was completed by 93 speech-language pathologists randomly selected from the Directory of The American Cleft Palate-Craniofacial Association. Although the majority rated nasopharyngoscopy as important in the assessment of velopharyngeal function, and believed that it should be performed by speech-language patholo...

To compare the knowledge and experience of medical students in 1989 with that of those surveyed in 1973, a questionnaire about the various aspects of cleft palate was completed by 209 medical students from West Virginia University and the Louisiana State University Medical Center at Shreveport and New Orleans. Results revealed that 1989 students we...

Questionnaire data about services and practices of cleft palate-craniofacial teams were obtained from 63 teams in 35 states. Findings indicate the following: (1) research was the least frequently conducted activity, although 73 percent of the teams Indicated that they conducted research; and (2) the majority of those responding regarded cinefluoros...

A questionnaire was administered to 108 dental students from West Virginia University to assess their knowledge of cleft palate. Results revealed areas of deficiency in basic knowledge and exposure to clefting. When these data were compared to those from an earlier study (Lass et al., 1973) differences were found of varying type. A comparison betwe...

A 16-item questionnaire designed to survey opinions on the management of velopharyngeal insufficiency (VPI) was distributed to all members (N = 296) of the American Cleft Palate Association who were speech-language pathologists. Questionnaires were completed by 173 respondents (58.4 percent). There were differences of opinion among speech-language...

Normal-hearing volunteers (N:30, aged 19-28 yrs) yielded intelligibility scores for W-22 word lists and CID sentences at 40 db re each S's SRT, and judgments on a 7-pt scale ("very pleasant"----"very unpleasant") for Sentence 3 of Fairbanks' "Rainbow Passage". Normal and time-altered speeds (60%: compression; 140%: expansion) were compared between...

The purpose of this survey was to determine the awareness of, experiences with, and attitudes toward nonverbal communication aids by special educators in county school systems throughout West Virginia. A 14-item questionnaire was constructed and distributed to special educators in 14 counties throughout the state. The counties were chosen to be rep...

The purpose of this series of experiments was to determine the effect of prior exposure to taped stimulus material on listeners' judgments of speakers' sex, height, and weight. Two series of listening experiments, one concerned with sex identification and one with height and weight identification, were conducted. Results indicate that prior exposur...

Because of their omission of available data in published height and weight identification studies, as well as methodological differences between these studies and their weight‐guessing experiment, Cohen e t a l. ’s [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 68, 1884–1886 (1980)] conclusions appear to be unjustified.

Cooper's (1975) Clinician Attitudes Toward Stuttering (CATS) inventories were conpleted by 1,902 speech-language pathology and audiology students from 33 universities, each in a different state. The majority of respondents perceived stutterers as having psychosocial problems and believed that client and parental counseling were essential aspects of...

The Scale of Educators' Attitudes Toward Speech Pathology (SEASP) was administered to school personnel in two rural county school systems, including: teachers in kindergarten through third grade, teachers in grades four through eight, and special education teachers. Analysis of responses showed that all three groups demonstrated a favorable attitud...

Our purpose was to determine the effect of phonetic complexity on speaker height and weight identification in an attempt to establish the minimal acoustic cues necessary for distinguishing speakers' heights and weights. A total of 28 speakers, 14 females and 14 males, recorded 16 utterances representing four levels of phonetic complexity: isolated...

The purpose of this investigation was to determine the importance of temporal features of speech in speaker height and weight identification. A total of 30 speakers, 15 females and 15 males, recorded a standard prose passage. Three master tapes were constructed from these recordings, representing the three experimental conditions in the study: forw...

Correlation coefficients on height, weight, and temporal features were computed separately for 15 female and 15 male speakers. With only one exception, speakers' heights and weights were not significantly correlated with their temporal characteristics. Implications of these findings and suggestions for future research are discussed.

The purpose of this investigation was to determine the importance of temporal features of speech in speaker race and sex identifications. A total of 20 speakers, 10 white (five females and five males) and 10 black (five females and five males) recorded four sentences. Three master tapes were constructed from these recordings, representing the three...

The purpose of this investigation was to determine if listener comprehension is differentially affected by two different techniques of time alteration: the sampling method and the harmonic compression method. The Nelson-Denny Reading Test, consisting of 8 selections of scientific and literary content appropriate for college students with respect to...

The method of magnitude estimation was used to scale naturally and mechanically altered rates of two passages in English and French. The scales obtained remained invariant across languages, texts and methods of altering rate. They were not invariant however when Ss estimated naturally and mechanically altered rates one after the other. In this case...

The recordings of 20 speech defective speakers' readings of a standard prose passage were presented to 36 student speech clinicians under three listening conditions: (1) unaltered; (2) time expanded to 150% of the original recording time; and (3) time-expanded to 200% of the original recording time. Results of their evaluations indicate that the ex...

The purpose of this investigation was to determine the relative importance of the speaker's laryngeal fundamental frequency and vocal tract resonance characteristics in speaker sex identification tasks. Six sustained isolated vowels were recorded by 20 speakers, 10 males and 10 females, in a normal and whispered manner. A total of three master tape...

A paired comparison paradigm was employed to determine the listening rate preferences of children. Recordings of a reading of a standard prose passage were time-altered by means of a speech compressor to yield nine rates: 100, 125, 150, 175, 200, 225, 250, 275, and 300 wpm. A master tape was constructed from the time-altered versions of the reading...

The psychological scaling procedure of direct magnitude estimation was employed to establish the relationship of measured and perceived rate of continuous speech stimuli. Time-altered recordings of a standard prose passage were prepared with a speech compressor to provide six variable rates: 75, 125, 175, 225, 275, and 325 w.p.m. A total of 30 mast...

The purpose of this investigation was to explore the consistency of subjects' temporal speech characteristics in a repetitive oral reading task. Thirteen subjects read " The Rainbow Passage " fifteen consecutive times in each of three experimental sessions. Analysis of the readings indicates that the subjects' temporal speech characteristics, inclu...

Investigated the importance of the sex of the listener in verbal transformation studies. 7 auditory stimuli, representing variations in meaningfulness and phonetic complexity, were repeatedly presented to 21 male and 21 female normal-hearing university students. Results indicate that there were no significant differences between males and females i...

Continued listening to recorded repetitions of a stimulus has been found to produce perceptual illusory changes in normal listeners. This phenomenon was discovered and labeled by Warren [Brit. J. Psychol. 52, 249–258 (1961)] as the verbal transformation effect. According to Warren, verbal information is normally stored and later confirmed on the ba...

20 subjects participated in 3 experimental sessions; 10 thresholds, 5 ascending and 5 descending, were obtained on each of 2 oral sites (tongue tip and tongue dorsum) in each session. Results indicate that subjects' two point limens are very consistent across sessions when obtained on the tongue tip. However, they exhibited poor reliability on the...

The purpose of this investigation was to determine the relative importance of the speaker’s laryngeal fundamental frequency and vocal tract resonance characteristics in speaker sex identification tasks. Six sustained isolated vowels (/i, -, -, a, o, u/) were recorded by 20 speakers, 10 males and 10 females, in a normal and whispered manner. A total...

20 Ss participated in 3 experimental sessions; 10 thresholds, 5 ascending and 5 descending, were obtained on each of 2 oral sites (tongue tip and tongue dorsum) in each session. Results indicate that Ss' two-point limens are very consistent across sessions when obtained on the tongue tip. However, they exhibited poor reliability on the tongue dorsu...

Investigated the effectiveness of nonspeech sounds as auditory stimuli in eliciting a nonverbal analog to the verbal transformation effect phenomenon. 25 college students were given 5 stimuli (3 pure tones of 250, 1,000, and 4,000 Hz, white noise, and a 5-note musical motif). Results indicate that the transformations elicited by the nonspeech stimu...

The temporal characteristics of picture-elicited and topic-elicited speech were compared in 25 adult Ss. No significant differences were noted in temporal measures between these two types of speeches. The speech-eliciting technique cannot be validly used to explain differences in prior research on speaking rate.

The verbal transformation effect, the phenomenon in which continued listening to recorded repetitions of a stimulus produces perceptual illusory changes in normal listeners, has been elicited by a variety of speech stimuli, including isolated vowels, consonant?vowel nonsense syllables, words, phrases, and sentences. The purpose of this investigatio...

Continued listening to recorded repetitions of a stimulus has been found to produce perceptual illusory changes in normal listeners. This phenomenon was labeled by Warren [Brit. J. Psychol. 52, 249?258 (1961)] as the verbal transformation effect. The purpose of this investigation was to compare the reported verbal transformations of phonetically tr...

2-point discrimination thresholds were established on 13 test sites (the midline, right, and left sides of the upper lip, lower lip, tongue tip, and tongue dorsum, and on the finger tip) in each of 14 Ss. A total of 10 thresholds, 5 ascending and 5 descending, were obtained at each site. It was found that all Ss exhibited evidence of asymmetry in t...

A paired comparison procedure was employed to determine the listening‐rate preferences of 100 adult subjects. The recording of a standard prose passage was time altered by means of a speechcompressor to yield nine reading rates: 100, 125, 150, 175, 200, 225, 250, 275, and 300 wpm. A total of four master tapes were constructed, one for each of the f...

Continued listening to recorded repetitions of a stimulus has been found to produce perceptual illusory changes in normal listeners. This phenomenon was labeled by Warren [Brit. J. Psychol. 52, 249–258 (1961)] as the verbal transformation effect. The purpose of the present investigation was to study the consistency of subjects' reported verbal tran...

Determined the effectiveness of single isolated vowels as auditory stimuli in eliciting perceptual illusory changes in ss, a phenomenon referred to by R. M. Warren (see pa, vol. 36:3gh49w) as the "verbal transformation effect." 3 vowels, /i/, /ae/, and /u/, were individually presented to a group of 24 19-24 yr. Old normal listeners in a single expe...

A total of 31 pause-altered recordings was constructed and played to a group of 78 judges for rate evaluation. Results indicate that pause time is an important variable in perceptual judgments of oral reading rate.