Properties of stuttered speech

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to compare the fluent and nonfluent speech of stutterers with the fluent speech of nonstutterers in terms of their prosodic features and spectrogram analyses. Three adult stutterers were matched with three nonstutterers and were asked to perform three tasks: passage reading, wordlist reading, and free speech. Results demonstrated that polysyllabic words and stressed syllables were more often stuttered, and speaking rate was slower in stutterers fluent and nonfluent speech. No differences were found between content and function words or in consecutive readings of the same passage. Spectrogram analysis showed increased glottal tension, more abrupt onsets and greater intensity of vowels within a stuttered segment. These findings suggest that glottal tension plays a role in the prolongation of phonemes and repetition of segments.