First Advisor

John A. Tetnowski

Date of Publication

5-9-1997

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (M.S.) in Speech Communication

Department

Speech Communication

Language

English

Subjects

Stuttering in children

DOI

10.15760/etd.7197

Physical Description

1 online resource (2, iv, 71 p.)

Abstract

Studies investigating the stuttered speech of children are fewer in number as compared to those exploring adult dysfluency. This is notable as the features that characterize child stuttering are generally thought to be significantly different from those that describe advanced stuttering. Clinical intervention programs currently use timing-based interventions as one means of treating stuttering. As such, acoustic data describing the timing disorder is critical to determining the efficacy of these programs for both children and adults. The present study investigated the difference in duration (in msec) between words of stuttered and nonstuttered utterances of children. The words immediately before and after a stuttered event were compared with the same words, produced by the same speaker, in the same nonstuttered utterance. Stimulus materials consisted of 20 items selected from the Patterned Elicitation Syntax Test, (PEST), (Young & Perachio, 1983). Sixty stimulus sentences (3 per item) were verbally presented to each of 3 preschool subjects who were instructed to repeat exactly what they heard. The stimulus sentences were presented on two different occasions, with a 5 minute break between each session to reduce the affects of adaption, to elicit corresponding speech samples from each subject. Analysis consisted of digital spectrographic strip measurement of word duration for the words immediately before (BSTUT) and after (ASTUT) a stuttered word. These measurements were then compared to word duration measurements for the exact corresponding words immediately before (BNSTUT) and after (ANSTUT) the same nonstuttered words produced by the same speaker. The results of two-tailed t-tests for paired samples calculated for BSTUT vs. BNSTUT (p=.998) and ASTUT vs. ANSTUT (p=.076) indicate no significant differences exist between the word durations of both data groups at the p=.05 level of confidence. The findings of the present study do not support the theory that stuttering effects the production of words immediately before and after a stuttered word in children's speech.

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Comments

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Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/30822

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