The paper reviews approaches for the investigation of speech quality in stuttering treatment including speech quality research in areas beyond stuttering, stuttering treatment speech quality research, pertinent findings from nontreatment stuttering research, and issues in recent speech quality management research with stutterers. (Author/DB)

This paper argues against definitions of stuttering which imply that all within-word disfluencies are stuttering and no between-word disfluencies are stuttering. The paper calls for a definition of stuttering that is not contradicted by available empirical information or clinical experience and is logically consistent. (JDD)

Analysis of use of positron emission tomographic measurements of resting-state regional cerebral blood flow in 29 men, 10 of whom stuttered, did not support the idea that developmental stuttering is associated with abnormalities of blood flow at rest. Findings did suggest an essentially normal functional brain terrain with a small number of minor…

The study with three adult stutterers evaluated the effects of instructions to rate and modify the naturalness of their speech and compared their self evaluations with evaluations of listeners. (Author/DB)

This paper reviews the prominent concepts of the stuttering event and concerns about the reliability of stuttering event measurements, specifically interjudge agreement. Recent attempts to resolve the stuttering measurement problem are reviewed, and the implications of developing an improved measurement system are discussed. (Author/JDD)

This study, involving an adolescent and adult male with stuttering problems, evaluated modification of the frequency of electroglottograph-measured phonation intervals on stuttering and speech naturalness. Both subjects demonstrated that stuttering could be controlled by modifying the frequency of phonation intervals within short duration ranges,…

Two experiments investigating interval-by-interval interjudge and intrajudge agreement for stuttered and nonstuttered speech intervals found that training of judges could improve reliability levels; judges with relatively high intrajudge agreement also showed relatively higher interjudge agreement; and interval-by-interval interjudge agreement was…

This commentary to EC 232 373 and EC 232 374 challenges the use of a speaker-based definition of stuttering and argues that use of the definition may only relocate the judgment reliability problem and raise as many validity problems as a listener-based definition of stuttering does. (JDD)

This replication study of time-interval judgments of stuttering found higher interjudge agreement than previously reported for event-based analyses of stuttering judgments or time-interval analyses of event judgments. Judges with high intrajudge agreement levels also showed higher interjudge agreement levels than did judges with low intrajudge…

Four experienced stuttering researchers viewed videodisks of spontaneous speech from chronic stutterers and attempted to locate the precise onset and offset of individual stuttering events. Results showed interjudge disagreements that challenge the reliability and validity of onset and offset judgments. Highly agreed stuttering events were…

Ten speech-language pathology students judged five-second audiovisually recorded speech intervals as stuttered or nonstuttered in group and single-subject experiments. Results showed that judgment accuracy tended to increase after training, both for speakers used during the training process and unfamiliar speakers. Slight increases in interjudge…