External Auditory Stimuli Research Articles

The differential effect of three auditory stimuli on the frequency of stuttering behaviors

In view of the frequent clinical use of external auditory stimuli in fluency building programs, the purpose of the present experiment was to compare the effects of rhythmic pacing, delayed auditory feedback, and high intensity masking noise on the frequency of stuttering by dysfluency type. Twelve normal hearing young adult stutterers completed an oral reading (approximately 250 syllables) and conversational speech task (3 min) while listening to the three auditory stimuli and during a control condition presented in random order. The results demonstrated that during oral reading all three auditory stimuli were associated with significant reductions in stuttering frequency. However, during conversational speech, only the metronome produced a significant reduction in total stuttering frequency. Individual dysfluency types were not differentially affected by the three auditory stimuli.

Control of the heart rate by external stimuli.

THE human cardiac pacemaker behaves as a nonlinear oscillator, whose period can be varied over a certain range by sympathetic and parasympathetic control. We have been able to vary the heart rate of human subjects non-invasively by causing an entrainment of the sinus rhythm with external auditory stimuli. This presumably acts through the nervous control mechanisms, and results from a neural coupling into the cardiac centres of the brain. It represents, therefore, a new adjunct to the ‘instrumental learning’ control of autonoinic activity, and, unlike the latter, does not require the determined effort of the subject.