Until this point, not much research has examined the difference in temporal characteristics for untreated stutterers in words surrounding a moment of stuttering. It is important to determine whether or not stutterers who have not been in treatment alter the duration of their speech when they stutter versus when they are fluent to determine what aids in the increase of fluency. The purpose of the present study was to examine the duration of the word prior to and following a stuttered word and the duration of the corresponding word in a nonstuttered episode. The following questions were to be addressed: 1) Is there a significant durational difference between a word preceding a stuttered word and the duration of the same word in a corresponding nonstuttered sentence? 2) Is there a significant difference between a word following a stuttered word and the duration of the same word in a corresponding nonstuttered sentence? Three subjects age 16 and older who had not received treatment for at least 4 years were selected. Subjects were recorded reading a list of 83 sentences selected from Fairbanks (1940) twice. Sentences containing a word that was stuttered in one reading and not in the other were used for analysis. The duration of the following word pairs in milliseconds was computed via the CSRE 4.2 program (Jaimeson, D.G., Ramji, K.V., Neary, T., & Baxter, T., 1993): 1) The duration of the word preceding a stuttered word within the same sentence (BSTUT) . 2) The duration of the same word in the corresponding nonstuttered sentence (BNSTUT) . 3) The duration of the word following a stuttered word within the same sentence (ASTUT) . 4) The duration of that same word in the corresponding nonstuttered sentence (ANSTUT) . A total of 144 samples were obtained. A two-tailed ~ test was run at the .05 level of confidence to determine significance between the BSTUT/BNSTUT and ASTUT/ANSTUT word pairs. Results yielded a significant difference between the durations of BSTUT and BNSTUT (P=.017). Conversely, analysis of the difference between ASTUT and ANSTUT revealed no significant difference in durations (P=.47).
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:pdx.edu/oai:pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu:open_access_etds-6031 |
| Date | 05 May 1995 |
| Creators | Peterson, Jennifer Dawn |
| Publisher | PDXScholar |
| Source Sets | Portland State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Dissertations and Theses |
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