Is Listener Comfort a Viable Construct in Stuttering Research?

Abstract

This article reports the development of a tool for measuring how comfortable a person feels when communicating with someone who has undergone treatment for stuttering. The person rates the speaker on a 9-point Listener Comfort Scale (9 = extremely comfortable , 1 = extremely uncomfortable ). In a preliminary investigation of the reliability and validity of the scale, 15 unsophisticated listeners rated video recordings of 10 adults before and after a prolonged-speech treatment for stuttering and of 10 matched controls. The results were compared with those of another 15 listeners who rated the same recordings with the widely used 9-point Speech Naturalness Scale (R. R. Martin, S. K. Haroldson, & K. A. Triden, 1984). Results showed that reliability of the Speech Naturalness Scale was superior to the Listener Comfort Scale, although users of both scales were able to distinguish between pretreatment speech, posttreatment speech, and the speech of controls. The results suggest that the Listener Comfort Scale captures information that is somewhat different than the information captured by the Speech Naturalness Scale. The authors concluded that the concept of listener comfort is a potentially useful additional way of investigating the social validity of behavioral treatments for stuttering.