Temporal Variability of Repeated Utterances by Normal Speakers and Stutterers

Abstract

Ten normal speakers, five stutterers, and five “cured stutterers” each repeated four different speech samples several times. The four samples were (1) an “easy” sentence, (2) a “hard” sentence, (3) an “easy” paragraph, and (4) a “hard” paragraph, where “easy” and “hard” refer to high and low frequency of occurrence in English of the content words used. In a separate fifth task, each subject tapped his finger as steadily as he could for 4 min. From each of these five repeated behaviors will be derived a variability measure (relative variance, or amount of variance per unit of time) that describes each subject's accuracy in repeating the time program of that behavior. The reliability of this measure, i.e., the stability of the measure across tasks for each subject will be examined, and its validity will be related to the normal and stuttering populations tested.