Studies in Stuttering as a Prosodic Disturbance

Abstract

In two experiments, various aspects of prosody in adult male stutterers and nonstutterers were studied. The results showed that (a) stutterers did not speak with a generally reduced pitch pattern, (b) they were able to place sentence accent correctly but had difficulty executing this prosodic feature, (c) stuttering episodes were located mainly on stressed syllables, (d) a fixed timing pattern of speech enhanced fluency, and (e) the intervals between stressed syllables were more variable in the speech of stutterers, even in symptom-free passages, than in the speech of nonstutterers. Results support the conclusion that stuttering, seen on the symptomatic level of disfluencies produced, is a prosodic disturbance.