Purpose: The purpose of this study was to compare judgments of stuttering made by students and clinicians with previously available judgments made by highly experienced judges in stuttering. Method: On two occasions, 41 university students and 31 speech-language pathologists judged the presence or absence of stuttering in each of 216 audiovisually…

The authors review and evaluate studies on spontaneous recovery from stuttering in children and conclude that the frequently cited 80% spontaneous recovery figure is too high. They propose that speech-language pathologists abandon the concept of spontaneous recovery when devising clinical management procedures for the stuttering child. (Author/CL)

Reactions of 33 college students to audiotaped speech samples of simulated moderate speech disorder of stuttering, hypernasality, and lateral lisping, as well as normal speech were measured. The students reacted to the speech disorders with a tendency of increased social distance in addition to judgments of lower evaluation, lower…

The influence of two parameters of self-initiated time-out from speaking were investigated with 33 adolescent and adult stutterers. When given the opportunity to determine time-out duration, subjects chose a relatively brief period. Significant improvements in fluency were observed during all three time-out conditions. (Author/SEW)

Stutterers (N=201) and their nonstuttering same sex siblings were distributed identically in early, average, and late categories of language onset. Late talkers had significantly higher frequencies of articulation problems than did stutterers who were early or average talkers and their siblings. (Author/CL)

The times needed to initiate and terminate voicing in response to series of short segments of auditory signal were studied for 20 stuttering and 20 nonstuttering children (ages for both groups 5 to 12). The effects of random reward and nonreward on the phonatory response times also were studied. (Author/PHR)

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…

Electrodermal activity, peripheral blood flow, and heart rate were recorded from 19 adult stutterers and 19 normal speakers during performance of jaw movements. There were no differences between the two groups of speakers, suggesting that the stutterers did not have abnormally high levels of autonomic activation in speech. (Author/DB)

In this study, 102 adult stutterers were assessed on state and trait anxiety before, and on trait anxiety after, intensive behavioral treatment. Results showed that persons who stutter have significantly higher levels of fear (trait anxiety) in a demanding speech situation and also higher levels of chronic anxiety (trait anxiety) than matched…

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 study determined through psychophysical comparison of scaling data that speech naturalness judgments of stutterers and nonstutterers from audiovisual recordings form a metathetic (or qualitative) rather than prothetic (or quantitative) continuum. Both direct magnitude estimation and equal-appearing interval scaling were valid, but interval…

This preliminary investigation of stuttering development and maturation of speech motor processes recorded the electromyographic activity of the orofacial muscles of nine children who stuttered. Results suggest that the emergence of tremor-like instabilities in the speech motor processes of stuttering children may coincide with aspects of general…

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,…

Paralinguistic behaviors, including speech rates and turn-taking behaviors, of five-year-old boys who stutter (n=11) and boys who do not stutter (n=11) and their fathers were investigated. No significant differences were found in comparisons of the two groups of fathers or of the two groups of children for any of the paralinguistic behaviors.…

This study compared duration characteristics of single repetitions of single-syllable words in the speech of 15 preschool children near the onset of stuttering to those of 18 nonstuttering children. There appeared to be a tendency for repetitions of very early stutterers to be faster than repetitions of nonstuttering children. (Author/DB)