Speech-associated attitudes of 70 stuttering and 271 nonstuttering Belgian elementary and middle school children were assessed. Stuttering students evidenced significantly more negative attitudes toward speech than did their nonstuttering peers. These attitudes became more negative with age among stuttering children, whereas attitudes of…

A study tested the differences between eight children (ages 6 through 11) who stutter and typical children on measures of narrative complexity and cohesion use in two narrative tasks and in stuttering frequency produced across tasks. No significant differences were found on measures of narrative complexity or cohesion use. (Author/CR)

A four-year study of 84 preschool children (25 to 59 months) who stutter found a continuous diminution in the frequency and severity of stuttering over time as many children progressed toward recovery. Findings indicate a 74% overall recovery rate for stuttering and a 26% persistency rate. (CR)

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…

A panel of speech professionals was randomly presented with speech samples from four neurogenic and four developmental stutterers and was asked to classify them accordingly without any patient knowledge. Results support the view that, based on the patient's verbal output only, it is difficult to distinguish between neurogenic and developmental…

The purpose of this study was to assess the effect of phonological neighborhood density on the speech reaction time (SRT) and errors of children who do and do not stutter during a picture-naming task. Participants were nine 3-5-year-old children who stutter (CWS) matched in age and gender to nine children who do not stutter (CWNS). Initial…

Neuroimaging studies have indicated that persistent developmental stuttering (PDS) may be associated both with an abnormality in white matter of left-hemispheric speech areas and a right-hemispheric hyperactivity. The latter may compensate for the deficient structural connectivity in the left hemisphere. To investigate the effects of stuttering…

Fifteen stutterers (aged 5-16) were treated using graded airflow, tension/relaxation, and electromyographic biofeedback to reduce stuttering frequency. In a second study, addition of a discriminative stimulus control procedure to maintain fluency made the treatment program more effective than the first study and achieved a level of <1% stuttered…

This study of 20 stuttering and 20 nonstuttering preschool children found that stuttering children scored lower on 7 out of 8 language measures, with no significant intergroup differences on articulation proficiency or fluency. There were few significant correlations between measures of stuttering rate, speaking rate, and language performance…

Ten preschool subjects exhibiting more disfluencies than 50 other subjects with language disorders were found to be older and score higher on vocabulary. Findings suggest some children with language disorders are at risk for fluency breakdown because of dysynchronies in development of lexical and syntactic aspects of language or as a result of…

Describes a clinical service delivery model for use with African-American children who stutter and their families. The model emphasizes the clinical importance of culture-based factors such as myths, oral presentation styles, narrative discourse styles, and cognitive learning styles, as well as rules for interaction and turn-taking. (Author/DB)

A survey of 241 school-based speech-language pathologists examined numbers of confirmed and suspected concomitant speech/language disorders in children who stutter and the preferred intervention approaches. Of 467 children, 44 percent had a verified concomitant phonological and/or language disorder with additional children suspected of having such…

The present study investigated how well individuals knowledgeable about stuttering are able to make disfluency judgments in clients who speak another language than their own. Fourteen native speakers of Brazilian Portugeuse identified and judged stuttering in Dutch speakers and in Portugeuse speakers. Fourteen native speakers of Dutch identified…

"Background": Clinical trials have shown that behavioural treatments based on variants of prolonged-speech (PS) are best practice for reducing the stuttering rate in adults. However, while stuttering is significantly reduced or eliminated for most adults in the short-term with such treatment, relapse in the longer-term is common. Consequently,…

This study evaluated whether slight decrements in hearing sensitivity are associated with other communicative deficits. Data from the 38,497 students included in the National Speech and Hearing Survey (NSHS) were used to partition students into three categories of hearing sensitivity, and the prevalence of other communicative problems was computed…