Say it With me: Stuttering Inhibited

Abstract

This study examined fluency enhancement in people who stutter via the concomitant presentation of silently mouthed visual speech. Ten adults who stutter recited memorized text while watching another speaker silently mouth linguistically equivalent and linguistically different material. Relative to a control condition, in which no concomitant stimulus was provided, stuttering was reduced by 71% in the linguistically equivalent condition versus only 35% in the linguistically different condition. Despite being an ‘incomplete’ second speech signal, visual speech possesses the capacity to immediately and substantially enhance fluency when it is linguistically equivalent to the intended utterance. It is suggested that fluency enhancement via concomitantly presented external speech is achieved through the extraction of relevant speech gestures from the external speech signal that compliment the intended production, thereby compensating for possible internal inconsistencies in the matching of speech codes in people who stutter. As visual speech perception relies on fewer redundant cues to demarcate the intended gestures, when used as an external stuttering inhibitor, higher degrees of linguistic equivalence seem to be necessary for optimal stuttering inhibition.