Persons who stutter often report their stuttering is influenced by emotional reactions, yet the nature of such relation is still unclear. Psychophysiological studies of stuttering have failed to find any major association between stuttering and the activity of the sympathetic nervous system. A review of published studies of heart rate in relation…

The purpose of this study was to examine the impact that stuttering has on job performance and employability. The method involved administration of a 17-item survey that was completed by 232 people who stutter, age 18 years or older. Results indicated that more than 70% of people who stutter agreed that stuttering decreases one's chances of being…

The present study investigated perceptual characteristics of speech in persons with stuttering before and after speech therapy. Five adult stutterers served as subjects. All the stutterers underwent prolongation therapy. Percentage of dysfluency, rate of reading, and type of dysfluencies were calculated in reading and spontaneous speech, before…

It was hypothesized that stuttering may be related to impaired sensory gating, leading to overflow of superfluous disturbing auditory feedback and breakdown of the speech sequence. This hypothesis was tested using the "acoustic startle prepulse inhibition" (PPI) paradigm. A group of 22 adults with developmental stuttering were compared…

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…

Background: The development of evidence-based practice, which is increasingly popular in stuttering treatment, is closely linked to the development of outcome measures. Aims: Two approaches to the development of stuttering treatment outcome measures are outlined. The first is the deductive, top-down approach, where the development of specific…

This article suggests a possible link between incipient stuttering and early difficulty in language formulation. The hypothesis offers a unifying explanation of an array of empirical observations. Among these observations are the following: early stuttering occurs only on the first word of a syntactic structure; stuttering does not appear to be…

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…

Consideration of directions for future research in stuttering. (CH)

Investigates the influence of word abstraction, part of speech, word length, and word frequency on the amount of non-fluencies of stuttering subjects. (RB)

THERAPY PROCEDURES BASED ON MOTOR PLANNING TECHNIQUES WERE DEVELOPED FOR THE TREATMENT OF YOUNG ADULT STUTTERERS. THE SUBJECTS FOR THIS STUDY WERE 24 MALE UNIVERSITY STUDENTS RECEIVING THERAPY FOR STUTTERING. USING RATINGS OF THE SEVERITY OF THEIR OVERT STUTTERING, THE INVESTIGATOR DIVIDED THE SUBJECTS INTO AN EXPERIMENTAL GROUP AND A CONTROL…

The postdoctoral fellowship research described in this document was based on three main areas: 1) single subject research, including experiments in learning with a rat and with three stutterers; 2) linguistic research, including basic research methodology and the analysis of morphological and syntactical structures in a language; and 3)…