The Verbal Summator Technique and Abnormal Mental States

rip HERE has been considerable interest during the last five years J[ in the possible application of the verbal summator technique suggested by Skinner (4) to the study of personality problems, particularly those which are more serious in nature, including the psychoses. Briefly, the verbal summator [or tautophone, as it has been renamed by Shakow (2)] is a device for repeating small samples of elemental speech sounds in such a way as to elicit a verbal response from the listener. On a phonograph disc are recorded series of different vowel patterns variously accented which, when played at a very low intensity and repeated as often as necessary, can be rather easily perceived as actual spoken words. In the presentation of the sounds to a subject an attempt was made to maintain an illusion of genuine but indistinct or distorted speech in order to facilitate the responses. Thus, the summator is a device for calling up verbal responses determined partly by the stimulus pattern presented and partly by the individual making the response. The possibility then exists of detecting the presence and direction of influence of the personality variable. The value of this possibility rests, of course, upon the ability of the test to bring out personality factors, presumably by differentiating between individual or group tendencies in the predominate or strong "latent" associations of the subjects or in other characteristic manners of response to the stimuli presented. The test is generally regarded as being of the so-called projective type. To check on the above-indicated function of the test, one of the possible methods is to compare the responses of personalities known to vary greatly in terms of such associative and response factors.