William B. Arndt

Critical characteristics of male serial murderers

Difficulties that have limited research on serial murder (i.e., definition, data, and conceptual framework) are addressed by the current study. Rickey’s Trauma-Control Model is utilized as a conceptual framework that is particularly helpful when sexual activity is involved. This study provides a rich description of male perpetrator characteristics (criminal history, age, and ethnicity), killing career characteristics (number of victims, length of career, solo or team killer, venue, weapons, and murder rate), and victim characteristics (relationship to killer and victim sex). Relationships among these characteristics are also examined.

Monitoring and reinforcement by parents as a means of automating articulatory responses.

A home training program for correction of articulation errors was tested with 8 children. The first week of the program involved short periods of word drill. The remaining 4 wk., parents were to listen daily to 40 conversational /s/ phone productions and to mark each production as correct or incorrect. Correct productions were rewarded by points to be accumulated and traded for prizes. Incorrect productions were corrected by the parent. Final probe scores did not differ significantly from mean baseline scores on a Sound Production Task. However, Talking Task and Reading Task measures showed differences significant at the .05 level. Four-month post-treatment scores indicated that gains made during the program were maintained.

Oral form recognition training and articulation change.

10 children with articulation disorders were given training in recognition of forms through oral exploration of those forms. Training materials were divided into sets. Fewer trials were required to reach performance criteria from one set to another, and fewer errors were made as Ss progressed from set to set. The control procedure used indicated that information gained through oral study of the forms contributed to performance but was not necessary to performance improvement. No gains were observed in any of four articulation measures.

Monitoring and Reinforcement by Parents as a Means of Automating Articulatory Responses: II. Study of Preschool Children

To establish articulatory responses on an automatic level 10 preschool children between 4 and 6 yr. of age were given training in production of a training sound out of context and in a set of 10 words. The mother of each child was oriented to a home program by means of a video tape that demonstrated activities to be employed. An audio tape was used to orient the mothers to the identification and evaluation of speech sounds. During the first wk. of home training, each mother was to evaluate her childs articulation of a training sound in an imitative word drill situation and in elicited conversation. Candy or stickers were given to the children for correct responses. During the remaining 4 wk., each mother was to monitor daily her childs spontaneous speech and to evaluate 30 conversational productions of the training sound. Correct responses were rewarded. When an incorrect response was produced, the mother was to have the child imitate the word after her. Each mother kept a record of how many of the 30 responses were correctly articulated each day. That record plus the childrens scores on sound-production tasks and talking-tasks constituted the data for analysis. For the group, sound-production task and talking-task measures obtained after training reflected better articulation than did pretreatment scores. Greater gains were made on sounds taught than on other sounds misarticulated by some of the children. Records accumulated by five of the parents also indicated improved articulation.

Variability in judgments of articulation when observer listens repeatedly to the same phone.

This study pertains to variability in articulation judgments made by Os who listened to repetitions of the same stimulus. In the first portion of the study, four Os were asked to listen to six tapes, each of which was prepared to present 90 repetitions of a syllable. The syllables were /sa/ and /rk/.2 The /s/ and /r/2 in two of the syllables were correctly articulated, in two they were moderately distorted, and in two they were severely distorted. Correctness of articulation of the target phones had been established previously by a panel of judges using a scaling procedure. The speakers were children with articulation problems. A total of 24 sets of judgments were obtained. For three of those sets, O frequently shifted between assessment of the phone as correct and incorrect. In the second portion, each of three tapes was evaluated by five of 15 judges. Two tapes were reused from the first part of the study, and a new tape presenting the same production of /is/ 90 times was also used. No judge listened to more than one tape. Again, a record was made of the frequency with which judges shifted in their assessment of a given articulation as correct or incorrect. More judges reported 12 or more shifts in the second portion of the study than in the first. Os consistency should be investigated in the situation where O evaluates a series of similar misarticulations of phones from the same phoneme.

Identification of persons with articulation errors from observation of non-speech movements.

Specialists in speech pathology differentiate between articulation problems caused by motor or sensory impairment arid functional articulation disorders for which the et.iology often is not known (1). Various behavioral factors are discussed as probable causes of these functional problems. However, writers have also suggested that these articulation disorders reflect sensory or motor problems which are too mild to be detected by available tests. Over the years various investigators have studied motor and sensory skills in persons with articulation impairment (2-17). These studies either reported incidence of a given kind of motor performance in a specified sample of subjects, compared the ineasurement of bodily performance in normal and defective speaking groups for difference in scores, or correlated performance scores with speech scores in specified subject groups. Tests were used to measure skill, touch localization, ability to place articulators in specified positions, rate, dindochokinesis, kinesthesis or strength. Also, the articulators were measured for size or relationship to other structures. Some of the studies pointed to a physiological factor in functional articulation disability and others did not. Direct comparison of any two studies is difficult because of differences in age of subjects, speech behavior of subjects, testing procedures and sophistication of statistical treatment of data. The results of these studies seem to be inconclusive. More recent studies suggest that physiological factors may contribute to the etiology of some functional articulation problems. Dicltson (18) identified 33 frst-, secondand third-grade children who had outgrown articulation problems that had been present the year before and 31 children who had not outgrown such problems. The children who failed to outgrow their articulation problems were inferior to the other group on the Oseretsky Tests of Motor Proficiency. The difference was statistically significant at the 0.01 level of confidence. Priris (19) compared children with different kinds of articulation errors-lisping, sound omissions and