Reading Fluency in Children and Adolescents Who Stutter

Abstract

Speech fluency is a major challenge for young persons who stutter. Reading aloud, in particular, puts high demands on fluency, not only regarding online text decoding and articulation, but also in terms of prosodic performance. A written text has to be segmented into a number of prosodic phrases with appropriate breaks. The present study examines to what extent reading fluency (decoding ability, articulation rate, and prosodic phrasing) may be altered in children (9–12 years) and adolescents (13–17 years) who stutter compared to matched control participants. Read speech of 52 children and adolescents who do and do not stutter was analyzed. Children and adolescents who stutter did not differ from their matched control groups regarding reading accuracy and articulation rate. However, children who stutter produced shorter pauses than their matched peers. Results on prosodic phrasing showed that children who stutter produced more major phrases than the control group and more intermediate phrases than adolescents who stutter. Participants who stutter also displayed a higher number of breath pauses. Generally, the number of disfluencies during reading was related to slower articulation rates and more prosodic boundaries. Furthermore, we found age-related changes in general measures of reading fluency (decoding ability and articulation rate), as well as the overall strength of prosodic boundaries and number of breath pauses. This study provides evidence for developmental stages in prosodic phrasing as well as for alterations in reading fluency in children who stutter.

Exploring Prosody of Stuttering Disorder Expressed on Matice Ahnjamine Vlog

“…The difference between the current research and several previous researches lies on the object, where this research used female subjects, while most previous studies used male subjects and adult categories (Saputri, 2018;Hardianti & Indah, 2020;Sari et al, 2020;Tuada & Damanhuri, 2020). In addition, several studies on prosody only concerns to the speeches of child and adult stutterers (Franke et al, 2021), prosody in terms of fluency analysis (Brugos et al, 2018) and prosody showing motor speech disorder (Boutsen & Dvorak, 2017). It still needs more exploration carefully examined by using voice pitcher application to portray the pattern of the intonation prosody of adult stuttering speech.…”