This study examined acoustic durations in 12 children (ages 3 to 9) who stuttered and received treatment based either on speech motor training (SMT) or extended length of utterance (ELU). Although the ELU treatment reduced stuttering more than the SMT, the SMT was more effective in increasing vowel duration and decreasing stop gap duration.…

Purpose: The purpose of this tutorial is to describe 10 criteria that may help clinicians distinguish between scientific and pseudoscientific treatment claims. The criteria are illustrated, first for considering whether to use a newly developed treatment and second for attempting to understand arguments about controversial treatments. Method:…

Purpose: This case study demonstrates the application of an assessment protocol for differential diagnosis of psychogenic stuttering, neurogenic stuttering, developmental stuttering, and malingering. Method: A male in his late 30s, accused of armed robbery, was evaluated for stuttering at the request of his defense attorney. The speech assessment…

Past research has suggested that children who stutter (CWS) may have less well-developed language skills than fluent children, and that such relative linguistic deficiencies may play a role in precipitating their disfluencies. However, data to support this position are primarily derived from results of standardized diagnostic inventories, which…

The Behavior Checklist, a self-report test procedure, was administered to 42 adults who stutter and 76 who do not in order to investigate the number, frequency of usage, type and nature of the responses that they reportedly employ to cope with the anticipation and/or presence of speech disruption. As a group, the participants who stutter reported…

Stuttering characteristics, assessment, and treatment principles present challenges to assessment and treatment that can be addressed with virtual reality (VR) technology. This article describes how VR can be used to assist clinicians in meeting some of these challenges with adults who stutter. A review of current VR research at the Stuttering…

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…