Unit-by-unit identification of stuttering is a commonly used clinical technique. Although widely used in the clinical process, investigations have revealed low agreement levels when comparing the unit-by-unit identifications made by different judges. Previous studies have attributed some of this disagreement to characteristics of the judges making the decisions. Only cursory factors (age and gender of judges) have been identified thus far. / The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between selected characteristics of judges and number of stuttering units identified by those judges, and secondly, to relate the same selected characteristics to the number of stuttering units in agreement with pooled judgements of stuttering made by experienced speech-language pathologists. Characteristics of judges studied were musical training, foreign language experience, singing experience (obtained through survey), musical aptitude (obtained from the Seashore Measures of Musical Abilities) academic success (obtained from grade point averages) and success on academic achievement tests (obtained from S.A.T. and G.R.E. scores). / Forty judges listened to audio recordings of 100 sentences (five repetitions of 20 sentences) which were read by confirmed stutterers. Judges marked where stuttering occurred on a script which would allow stuttering identification on a word or in the space between words. Number of stuttering units marked by judges and number of stuttering units marked in agreement with experienced clinicians were tabulated for all judges. / Spearman correlation coefficients beyond the.05 level of significance were calculated for total number of stuttering units identified by judges and 2 G.R.E. subtests (analytic and quantitative scores). Number of stuttering units identified by judges which were in agreement with experienced clinicians were positively correlated beyond the.05 level with G.R.E quantitative score, G.R.E. analytic score and total G.R.E. score and negatively correlated beyond the.05 level with self judged foreign language competency. / These findings should be treated cautiously due to large confidence interval calculated for this sample size. Trends in the data distribution, future research directions and implications for student selection into graduate programs are discussed. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 54-09, Section: B, page: 4631. / Major Professor: Richard E. Ham. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1993.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_77013 |
| Contributors | Tetnowski, John Anthony., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 232 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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