ASA 129th Meeting - Washington, DC - 1995 May 30 .. Jun 06

4aSC13. Interrelationships between ethanol intoxication and speech.

Harry Hollien

Inst. for Advanced Study of the Commun. Process., Univ. of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611

Camilo A. Martin

Chemical Abuse Treatment Ctr., Veterans Admin. Med. Ctr., Gainesville, FL 32601

The focus of this paper is on (1) establishing well-controlled procedures which will permit reasonably precise study of the effects of intoxication on speech and (2) assessing correlations between physiological and behavioral measures of intoxication. In the first instance, selection and exclusionary criteria will be discussed and their impact on the resulting experiments noted. Included will be (1) subject selection (familial history, background, health, gender, drug/medication status, drinking patterns), (2) dosage protocols (control over and monitoring of intoxication, modifications), and (3) procedural constraints (speech tasks, experimental controls). Some of the criteria and procedures employed proved satisfactory, others did not and had to be modified. Second, two aural-perceptual experiments (eight talkers, 106 auditors) will be reported; a scaling model was used in the first, three variations of a blind sort procedure in the second. Two patterns of subject behavior were found; one correlated well with the physiological measures of intoxication but the other did not. Moreover, the differences in the speech shifts did not appear directly related to subjects' drinking patterns. [Research supported by NIH.]