SUPPRESSION OF NORMAL SPEECH DISFLUENCIES THROUGH RESPONSE COST¹

Abstract

The speech disfluencies of five normal-speaking college students were modified in a series of 10 to 17 sessions by means of response cost. During Point-loss, each disfluency (repetition or interjection of a sound, syllable, word, etc.) resulted in the loss of a penny, as indicated on a screen in front of the subject. Disfluencies were suppressed and kept at very low levels for four of the subjects during the punishment procedures, and there was general resistance to extinction. Even though points were subtracted only during speech, there was a tendency for disfluencies to decrease, though not as markedly, during reading probes as well.A number of investigators have attempted to identify the variables that influence the distribution of disfluencies in normal speakers, and these responses have variously been regarded as an index to the speaker's emotional state (Mahl, 1956), "speaker uncertainty" (Goldman-Eisler, 1961), or as indications of the functional units employed by the speaker as he "programs" speech (Boomer, 1965).Speech disfluencies are of special interest to students of stuttering, because of the topographical similarity disfluent behaviors share with moments of stuttering, and because of the possibility that the speech disruptions of normal and abnormal speakers may somehow be functionally related. In recent years, several authors have presented the view that normal disfluencies and stuttering fall along a single continuum (Bloodstein, Alper, and Zisk, 1965;Shames and Sherrick, 1963;Goldiamond, 1965). This raises the possibility that the study of disfluency may prove a productive way of gathering insights into the problem of stuttering.A considerable body of literature indicates that a variety of response-contingent stimuli will suppress the frequency of both stuttering and normal speech disfluencies (e.g., Martin, 1968;Goldiamond, 1965; Siegel, in press tained with shock, loud noise, delayed auditory feedback, the word "wrong", and other stimuli. Studies of the effects of punishment on normal disfluencies are particularly interesting because of the important role that is usually accorded to punishment of early speech attempts in many contemporary theories of the origins of stuttering Johnson, 1959;Shames and Sherrick, 1963).Weiner (1962) has described response cost as a punishment procedure that seems to capture some of the natural contingencies inherent in behavior. Response cost would appear to be particularly relevant to the study of such maladaptive behaviors as stuttering in which the act of speaking almost inevitably involves both physical and social cost to the speaker. Halvorson (1968) found response cost to be a very effective method for reducing stuttering. The present experiment used a response-cost procedure with the disfluencies of five normal speakers. We were interested in determining the extent to which these apparently natural units of speech could be suppressed by response cost and whether results obtained with spontaneous speech would also generalize to a reading task. METHOD Subjec...

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