Lecture 1

Question 1

ABC
Aspects of Stuttering (ABC

Answer 1

Affective
Feelings, Fear, Embarrassment , Anger Frustration, Anxiety

Behavioral
Effort/Intensity Duration
Type
Prolongations
Tense Pauses
Repetition: sound, syllable, phrase

Cognitive
Thoughts and believe

Question 2

Affective reaction

Answer 2

Anticipation
Expectancy
Fear
Anxiety
Worry
Panic
Shame
Anger
Humiliation

Question 3

Behavioral reaction

Answer 3

Avoidance
Circumlocutions
Disguise
Body movements

Question 4

Affective reaction

Answer 4

 Affective
 Shame
 Guilt
 Anger
 Frustration
 Humiliation
 Embarrassment

Question 5

Incidence vs. Prevalence
Prevelance
Incidence
Family history

Answer 5

Incidence vs. Prevalence
Prevalence- rate of PWS in the population at any one time period.
School children 0.5% to 2.1%; within the population about 0.8%.

Incidence – rate of new occurrences of stuttering within a given period (per year).
Cultural influences on incidence – high vs. low pressure, child-rearing.

Lifetime incidence in population: about 5%
Onset is between 2 and 5.
Prevalence declines during junior high and adulthood.

Sex ratio 3 or 4 males to 1 female
Bloodstein. Socio-economic status. Upward mobility.

Family history. 20 studies–42% PWS had relatives who stutter.
Concordance for stuttering in identical twins 17-25%, fraternal -2-6%sex ratio

Question 6

Core Behaviors
4

Answer 6

Motor mistiming of respiration, phonation and articulation or inability to
program coarticulation features.

Repetitions usually develop first; vary in rate and rhythm, Schwa vs. vowel.
Sounds, syllables, single syllable whole words

Prolongations
Audible: Vary in loudness, tension, air flow, pitch. Grouping
Vocalized and Nonvocalized

Disrhythmic phonations, broken words

Blocks, Tense pauses
Articulatory postures of phonatory arrests Inaudible – Nonvocalized
Silent fixations
Complete stoppage

Question 7

Secondary Behaviors

Answer 7

Stuttering tremor
Gasps and speech on inhalation
Movements

Avoidance – prevent the occurrence of stuttering
refusal to speak
circumlocutions
change of sentence structure, pretend stupidity
Changing the manner of speaking – “sing speech,” new accent,
falsetto

Postponement devices – delay feared words, situations

Timing devices “starters” – helps to initiate the feared word
eye blinking, gasps, head nods

Disguise reactions- coughing, laughing, covering mouth

Question 8

Covert Behaviors

Answer 8

 Expectation of unpleasantness

 Fear influenced by: characteristics of listeners, content of
message, words and their positions in utterances, acoustic and
motoric features of sounds

 Types of fears:
Situational, generalize to similar situations
time pressure, communicative content, phonemic fear.
Frustration, existential, feeling of being suppressed.

Question 9

Personalities of People Who Stutter

Answer 9

Personality
A wide range of personality types and emotional adjustments
Stereotype of male PWS: nervous, shy, withdrawn, incompetent.
Female: naïve, insecure, unsociable, masculine.

Parents of PWS
Tendency to be more anxious, perfectionist or dominating
Talk more rapidly and interrupt more often

Question 10

Phenomena of Stuttering

Answer 10

 Adaptation effect – reduction in stuttering with each repeated
reading as speaker continues to read the same material or
repeats utterances about a similar topic.

 Anticipation (expectancy) –anticipation of a stuttering episode
(63—93% during reading. Children cannot anticipate as well as
adults.

 Consistency – tendency of stuttering episode to reoccur on the
same word (50—75% on words stuttered before)

 Adjacency- occurrence of stuttering episodes in clusters.

Question 11

Linguistic factors

Answer 11

 Word position – initial sound of words.
Sentence position – initial word.
Word length – long words.
Syllable stress – stressed syllables
 Consonant-vowel effect – more stuttering on consonants than on
vowels.
 Information load – more stuttering on least predictable words, from
context.
 More stuttering on low-frequency words.
 More stuttering on content word; less on functional words and on
complex grammatical structures.

Question 12

Characteristics of Stuttering (Cont’d)

Answer 12

 Consonant-vowel effect – more stuttering on consonants than
on vowels.
 Information load – more stuttering on least predictable words,
from context.
 More stuttering on low-frequency words.
 More stuttering on content word; less on functional words and
on complex grammatical structures.

Question 13

Frequency of Stuttering
Factors

Answer 13

 Communicative responsibility or status of listener
(talking to dog vs. boss)
 Time pressure.
 Listener reaction to stuttering

Question 14

Frequency of Stuttering (Cont)
Scenarios that increase and decrease it

Answer 14

Frequency varies with attention to stuttering

 Novel modes of speaking (accent change)
 Associated activity (gesturing, jogging, writing).
 Emotional arousal
 Intense stimuli (e.g., loud noise, pain, drugs)

Question 15

Frequency of Stuttering
Starkweather

Answer 15

Fluency
 Fluency, from Latin for ‘flowing’
(Ongoing flow of information)

 Starkweather (1987)
* linguistic fluency - syntactic, semantic, phonologic, pragmatic
* speech fluency - continuity, rate, duration, coarticulation, and effort
Fluent speech:
some typical disfluencies
little cognitive or physical effort by the speaker (and listener)
feeling good (or neutral) about speaking
 “talking on thin ice”- stuttering
(Logan, 2021)

Question 16

Causes of Stuttering

Answer 16

 Stuttering can be explained by physiological factors, environmental
causes, or a combination of both. Learning factor is common for every
model;
 70/30 split between inherited and environmental influences
(Dworzynski et al., 2007).
 Genetic studies show strong evidence of physiological factor. Cases of
adopted children with family history of stuttering in the adopting family
proves an environmental involvement.
 Identical twins have higher concordance for stuttering. (17-25%) than
fraternal (2-6%) (Andrews, et al)

Question 17

Physiological Causes
Early period to current

Answer 17

 Early periods. Religious explanation
 Weakness in peripheral systems, such as tongue, from Aristotle
to 19th century
 Larynx (1960s, 1970s)
 The most popular theory focuses on cerebral dominance and
on cortical representation of speech and language functions.