The relationship of syllabic stress, word onsets, and stuttering was examined in selected words within a set of 40 controlled sentences containing bisyllabic words with contrastive stress. Among findings were that participants displayed a greater tendency to stutter on word onsets than stressed syllables or other subsequent syllables. (Author/DB)

The study found no significant trends in the change of acoustical durations of stutter- and disfluency-free speech from readings in an adaptation series with four adapting, four nonadapting, and four nonstuttering subjects (all young adults). Findings suggest that adaptation of stuttering and other fluency-inducing conditions are a result of…

Cluster formation in speech disfluencies of 15 preschool stuttering children and 15 nonstuttering controls was studied and compared. Clustering was found to be a significant factor in disfluent speech for both normal and stuttering children, but proportions of clustered disfluencies and size of clusters were significantly greater in the…

This study examined interjudge agreement levels for five adult listeners assessing either overt stuttering or disfluency types in the spontaneous speech of eight young children. Results showed that the interjudge reliability for judgments based on a disfluency taxonomy was not significantly different from that based on stuttering. The importance…

Experimental studies are reviewed in which stuttering and speech disfluency were subjected to response contingent stimuli (RCS). Research issues are discussed, including response-stimulus contiguity, subject awareness, behavior definitions, stimulus control of responses, subject variability, effects of RCS on nonstuttered speech parameters,…