Duration of Sound Prolongation and Sound/Syllable Repetition in Children Who Stutter

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to measure the duration of sound prolongations and sound/syllable repetitions (stutterings) in the conversational speech of school-age children who stutter. The relationships between duration and (a) frequency and type of speech disfluency, (b) number and rate of repeated units per instance of sound/syllable repetition, (c) overall speech rate, and (d) articulatory rate were also examined. Results indicated that for the children in this study the average duration of stuttering was approximately three-quarters of a second, and was not significantly correlated with age, length of post-onset interval, or frequency of speech disfluency. In addition, findings can be taken to suggest that part of the clinical significance of stuttering duration for children who stutter might lie in its relationship to the amount of sound prolongations these children produce, as well as their articulatory rate during fluent speech.

Characteristics of stuttering-like disfluencies in Dutch-speaking children

“…So far however, chronological age has not been significantly correlated with the frequency of disfluency (Ambrose & Yairi, 1999;Pellowski & Conture, 2002;Yaruss et al, 1998;Zebrowski, 1994) and although boys have a higher frequency of disfluency compared to girls, the differences are not statistically significant (Yairi, 1981;Yairi & Lewis, 1984;Yaruss et al, 1998).…”

“…DP=disrhythmic phonation; SSWR=single-syllable word repetition; PWR=part-word repetition; WR=word repetition. Yairi et al (1993) 16 11.99 6.83 Ambrose and Yairi (1999) 90 10.37 6.42 Hubbard and Yairi (1988) 15 16.88 a Pellowski and Conture (2002) 36 8.7 5.50 Yairi and Ambrose (1992) 27 12.91 Yairi and Ambrose (2005) 103 11.30 6.64 Yaruss et al (1998) 100 10.67 7.50 Yairi and Lewis (1984) 10 16.43 Zebrowski (1991) 10 8.4 Zebrowski (1994) 14 13.28 8.86 a Number reported by Yairi and Ambrose (2005) referring to the study of Hubbard and Yairi (1988).…”

“…Duration and physical tension of speech disfluencies also appear to differ between the groups (Ambrose & Yairi, 1995;Pellowski & Conture, 2002;Throneburg & Yairi, 1994;Zebrowski, 1994). In general, stuttering children show a longer duration of repetitions and sound prolongation.…”

“…Present values are difficult to compare with the Zebrowski' (1991Zebrowski' ( , 1994 acoustic measures of duration of sounds (measured in ms from the beginning to the end of a sound), because in the present study the duration was perceived in terms of duration categories. Likewise, comparison of present findings of duration of sound prolongations and blocks to those of Yaruss et al (1998) -the latter who only provided mean duration of withinword disfluencies -must be done with caution.…”

Duration of Stuttered Syllables Measured by “Computerized Scoring of the Stuttering Severity (CSSS)” and “Pratt”

“…Using the keywords stuttering, stutterer(s), stutter, disfluency, disfluencies, duration, durational, Praat, and CSSS-2, through an electronic search on PubMed during June-July 2017, we found 7 articles that investigated the duration of SLDs as part of the study [32][33][34][35][36]. Just 1 out of these 7 articles was performed on adults [36] Print while the rest included children and adolescences as their participants.…”