Purpose: In this study, the author examined the following questions: What proportion of adult persons who stutter (PWS) choose fluency and what proportion choose to be free from a need to be fluent in managing their stuttering? What demographic and stuttering-related variables influence their choice, and how consistent are they in their choice?…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate whether lexical access in adults who stutter (AWS) differs from that in people who do not stutter. Specifically, the authors examined the role of 3 lexical factors on naming speed, accuracy, and fluency: word frequency, neighborhood density, and neighborhood frequency. If stuttering results…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine (a) the role of neighborhood density (number of words that are phonologically similar to a target word) and frequency variables on the stuttering-like disfluencies of preschool children who stutter, and (b) whether these variables have an effect on the type of stuttering-like disfluency produced.…

Background: Response-contingent time-out has been shown to be an effective technique for enhancing fluency in people who stutter. However, the factors that determine individual responsiveness to time-out are not well understood. Aims: The study investigated the effectiveness of using response-contingent time-out to reduce stuttering frequency in…

Speech analysis of 10 two- to three-year-olds diagnosed by parents as having begun stuttering and 10 matched normally speaking children indicated that stutterers were three times more disfluent than nonstutterers. Part-word repetitions and sound prolongations were found to distinguish the two groups significantly. (Author/CL)

Participants of stuttering treatment programs provide an opportunity to evaluate persons who stutter as they demonstrate varying levels of fluency. Identifying physiologic correlates of altered fluency levels may lead to insights about mechanisms of speech disfluency. This study examined respiratory, orofacial kinematic and acoustic measures in 35…

Electroglottographic (EGG) and acoustic waveforms of the first few glottal pulses of voicing were monitored and voice onset time (VOT) measured during an adaptation task performed by adult stutterers and controls. Fluent utterances of stutterers resembled those of controls. After dysfluencies, however, the EGG signal increased gradually, lending…

The paper summarizes recent thinking on several aspects of early childhood stuttering, including the acquisition of fluency in young children and its relationship to language acquisition, the relationship of normal childhood nonfluencies to early stuttering, stuttering's relationship to language acquisition, and psycholinguistic influences on…

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)

Purpose: Previous research has demonstrated the fluency-improving effect of reducing the occurrence of short-duration, phonated intervals (PIs; approximately 30-150 ms) in individuals who stutter, prompting the hypothesis that PIs in these individuals' speech are not distributed normally, particularly in the short PI ranges. It has also been…

A study compared the laryngeal behavior associated with the perceptually fluent speech of 3-to-7-year-old stutterers (N=8) to that of normally fluent peers (N=8). Analysis of electroglottograph readings indicated that normally fluent children exhibited significantly more typical patterns during consonant-vowel and vowel-consonant transitions than…

The study assessed the effect of increasing the difficulty of reading material on the frequency and type of disfluency in the oral reading of 80 normally fluent elementary school children. Results indicated a significant increase in total moments of disfluency and four specific types of disfluency as the difficulty of reading material increased.…

Voicing onset changes between control conditions and three fluency-evoking conditions (choral reading, delayed auditory feedback, and noise) were studied in 10 individuals who stutter and in 12 controls. Results indicate that although fluency-evoking conditions modified some voicing-onset behaviors, these modifications did not relate to…