Talkers adjust their vocal effort to communicate at different distances, aiming to compensate for the sound propagation losses. The present paper studies the influence of four acoustically different rooms on the speech produced by 13 male talkers addressing a listener at four distances. Talkers raised their vocal intensity by between 1.3 and 2.2 dB per double distance to the listener and lowered it as a linear function of the quantity "room gain" at a rate of -3.6 dB/dB. There were also significant variations in the mean fundamental frequency, both across distance (3.8 Hz per double distance) and among environments (4.3 Hz), and in the long-term standard deviation of the fundamental frequency among rooms (4 Hz). In the most uncomfortable rooms to speak in, talkers prolonged the voiced segments of the speech they produced, either as a side-effect of increased vocal intensity or in order to compensate for a decrease in speech intelligibility.

Scores of blind and partially sighted children on verbal WISC scales were compared with those of sighted children in an attempt to discover whether the factor structures of the two groups corresponded. Score differences were caused mainly by the Comprehension and Digit Span subtests, blind and partially sighted children scoring lower than sighted children on the former, but higher on the latter. Intercorrelations among subtest scores were substantially stronger for blind children, with the exception of Digit Span. For sighted children, subtest scores were much more scattered, though scores on Information and Vocabulary, and Arithmetic and Digit Span, fell relatively close together.