The First Three Words

Abstract

The regularly reported influence on stuttering of early sentence position, particularly the first three words, evidently is confounded with the influence of grammatical class, another variable consistently found to correlate with stuttering frequency. Representative samples of English prose are found to contain, in early sentence positions, words of grammatical classes known to be associated with high stuttering frequency. Use of a specially constructed passage, which markedly altered the grammatical class composition of the first three words of sentences, resulted in significant changes in the typical patterns of stuttering frequency associated with word position and grammatical class. The findings lead to an analysis which identifies linguistics stress as the essential feature responsible for the effect on stuttering of both grammatical class and sentence position.

Speech Disfluency Types of Fluent and Stuttering Individuals: Age Effects

“…A possible explanation may be the fact that, for children, speech disfluencies predominantly occurred in function words [24][25][26][27] . Among function words, the article was the grammatical class with the highest number of speech disfluencies [25][26][27] .…”

“…When the speaker is articulating a lexical unit, the motor programming of the subsequent unit is already available. For fluency to be achieved, the mechanism used by the speaker can be the prolongation of the end of the previous word [24,25] .…”

Vowel Duration and Voice Onset Time for Stressed and Nonstressed Syllables in Stutterers under Delayed Auditory Feedback Condition

“…Referring to stutterers' problems to pro duce stressed elements [Wingate, 1979[Wingate, , 1984, we hypothesize that stutterers might experience difficulty in switching over the APC from weak to strong or vice versa, which in turn might be responsible for the repetition of syllables. Therefore, the pur pose of the present study is to apply our methods of manipulating auditory feedback and analyzing fluent speech to stutterers.…”

Preponderance of Lead Voice Onset Times in Stutterers Under Varying Constraints

“…Among the well-known variables that affect VOT are rate of speech production, location of lexical stress, and location of the word within a spoken sequence (Viswanath & Rosenfield, 1991;Wayland, Miller, & Voltis, 1994). Fortunately, these variables are also correlated with increased probability of stuttering events (Bloodstein, 1995;Wingate, 1979). VOT is longer at the normal rate rather than a fast rate (Wayland et al).…”

“…It is a well-researched dimension in the initial syllables of words. This is a fortunate circumstance for stuttering research because the beginning of words is the most likely location for stuttering disruption (Wingate, 1979). Generally, VOT studies in stutterers were explicitly or implicitly motivated by the following question: &dquo;How fast a stutter begins voicing after stop release?&dquo; The idea was that slower onset of voicing signals laryngeal involvement that serves as a basis for discoordination (Agnello & Wingate, 1972;Healy & Gutkin, 1984;Hillman & Gilbert, 1977;Jancke, 1994;Metz et al, 1979;Watson & Alfonso, 1982).…”