Studies in the sources of variation in close scores. I. The raters.

The intent of the study was to find out whether raters possessing certain characteristics might be better at predicting speech in general, using the cloze procedure, and also whether some raters might be better at predicting certain types of speech (alcoholic vs. schizophrenic speech). 279 raters were characterized in terms of IS variables, including 7 socioeconomic characteristics and 6 verbal performance measures. Each rater was asked to predict 2 alcoholic and 2 schizophrenic speech passages. The verbal score on the School and College Ability Test related significantly to the prediction of both alcoholic and schizophrenic speech. There was a negative correlation between the verbal association nonantonym popular score and the guessing of schizophrenic speech.