The purpose of this study was to investigate the exchange of disfluencies from function words to content words with age in Brazilian Portuguese speakers who do and do not stutter. Ninety stuttering individuals and 90 controls, native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese, were divided into three age groups (children, adolescents and adults). The study…

This paper describes a study in which Systemic Functional Linguistics was applied to describe how people who stutter use language. The aim of the study was to determine and describe any differences in language use between a group of 10 adults who stutter and 10 matched normally-fluent speakers. In addition to formal linguistic analyses, analyses…

Two studies compared the accuracy and efficiency of initiating oral reading of nonsense syllables by persons who stutter (PWS) and fluent speakers (PNS) over practise. Findings of Study One, comparing 12 PWS and 12 PNS, replicated previous findings of slow speech sequence initiation over practise by PWS relative to PNS. In Study Two, nine PWS and…

This article analysed the acoustic structure of voiced stop ++ vowel sequences in a group of persons who stutter (PWS). This phonetic unit was chosen because successful production is highly dependent on the differential tweaking of right-to-left anticipatory coarticulation as a function of stop place. Thus, essential elements of both speech motor…

Clinical diagnostic procedures to distinguish stuttering from non-stuttering individuals partially rely on the observation of characteristics of stuttered words or syllables. The purpose of this study was to examine the sensitivity and specificity of such a procedure, and to describe the observed characteristics of stuttered words. Methods…

The current study investigated whether phonetic complexity affected stuttering rate for Spanish speakers. The speakers were assigned to three age groups (6-11, 12-17 and 18-years plus) that were similar to those used in an earlier study on English. The analysis was performed using Jakielski's Index of Phonetic Complexity (IPC) scheme in which each…

The present paper integrates the results of experimental studies in which cognitive differences between stuttering and nonstuttering adults were investigated. In a monitoring experiment it was found that persons who stutter encode semantic information more slowly than nonstuttering persons. In dual-task experiments the two groups were compared in…