Part II A Study of the Relationship between Stuttering Occurrence and Phonetic Factors in Oral Reading

Abstract

43 of 52 adult stutterers completed an expt. in which they read aloud in 4 situations in which the audience complexity was changed from reading aloud with no one listening to reading before a number of people. It was possible to arrange the various speech sounds on which stuttering occurred in accordance with both median and mean per cent of stuttering. This ranking correlated roughly with the earlier studies of Brown and Johnson. However, there are large individual variations. 17 of the 43 stutterers showed predominance of stuttering on certain sounds. This ranking of difficulty is not related to any known phonetic factor or principle, and does not appear to be related causally to any physical phonetic factors. This was true not only of the group averages but of individual stutterers. The preponderance of stuttering occurs on initial sounds. The majority of medial consonants giving difficulty were at the beginning of accented syllables. Since no phonetic difficulties seem to be involved, some psychological principle must be operating, but the data of the study do not give any light on such a proposed psychological factor.