Below is a list of standard procedures, involving normal adult volunteer subjects, for which we have "blanket" approval from Committee A of the Joint UCL/UCLH Committees on the Ethics of Human Research.

This blanket approval does NOT apply to research involving subjects under 18 years of age, nor to any clinical subject groups. Research with these subjects requires a full ethical approval application. The only exception to this is when a researcher or student is added as a new named assistant to a research project for which the project supervisor already has current ethical approval for the procedures and subject group to be used by the researcher or student.

These blanket approvals do not allow the payment of significant remuneration to adult subjects, only the payment of travel expenses and an honorarium not exceeding £5 per hour.

Standard procedures approved for research with normal adult volunteers:

• Making recordings (microphone and laryngograph)

• Listening tests which involve presentation at comfortable levels via loudspeaker or headphones

• Non-invasive pure-tone audiometric tests

• Making judgements on oral or written material

• Completing or copying utterances

• Visual sorting tasks

• Description of visual materials

• Structured conversation and story telling.

Most oral components of the linguistic tasks involve ordinary oral input without headphones, but with recording of participants' responses. Where the input is written, some computer screen work may be involved.

The Ethics Committee requests that we inform them of the results of projects.

Posted 6/10/99.mth for EA