Part II A Study of the Relationship between Stuttering Occurrence and Phonetic Factors in Oral Reading

Linguistic stress, within-word position, and grammatical class in relation to early childhood stuttering

“…Since the early work of Brown in the 1930s numerous studies have replicated his finding that stuttering events occur more often on stressed syllables than on unstressed syllables (e.g., Bergmann, 1986;Hahn, 1942;Klouda & Cooper, 1988;Natke, Grosser, Sandrieser, & Kalveram, 2002;Prins, Hubbard, & Krause, 1991;Wingate, 1984). The investigation of the stress effect has so far only been carried out with adolescents and adults who stutter, that means persons with a long history of stuttering.…”

Stuttering Frequency on Meaningful and Nonmeaningful Words in Adults Who Stutter

“…This is exemplifi ed by Brown [5 , p. 192, italics added] , who states 'it is probably in terms of the evaluation of words as being conspicuous, prominent, or meaningful that the loci of stuttering are to be accounted for, rather than directly in terms of the sheer presence or absence of any linguistic factor or factors. This viewpoint was reinforced by Hahn [11,12] and Eisenson and Horowitz [10 , p. 196] , who suggested that 'an increase in propositional value produces a greater range of percentage of stuttered words among the various parts of speech'. Brown [4 , p. 214] provided an intuitive rationale for the impact of word meaning on stuttering frequency.…”

Phonological complexity in school-aged children who stutter and exhibit a language disorder

“…Regarding initial phonemes, we found in the present data that 95% of stuttered words were C-initial (98% S-Only; 92% S + LD), and 50% were voiceless consonants (49% S-Only; 51% S + LD). A third of the stuttered words (i.e., 32% of the 105 words from the talker groups combined; 27% S-Only; 38% S + LD speakers) began with these singleton consonants: /t/, /d/, /g/, /z/, /l/, /j/, // /tʃ/, those identified as frequently stuttered from the Johnson and Brown (1935) and Hahn (1942) studies.…”

“…Their findings showed that the most frequently stuttered speech sounds were the stops /t/, /g/, the fricative /z/, and the sonorants /l/ and /j/. Another early study (Hahn, 1942) showed the specific sounds most likely to be stuttered were the voiced stops /g/, /d/, but also the interdental fricatives, and the affricate /tʃ/.…”