Effect of Adjacency on the Distribution of New Stutterings in Two Successive Readings

Abstract

The consistency with which stuttering tends to occur on the same words in successive readings of a passage, though high enough to warrant the assumption that stuttering is a response to stimuli, is generally far from perfect. It was hypothesized that this is partly because stuttering sometimes occurs adjacent to previously stuttered words rather than on them, as a result of a type of adjacency effect. Ten stutterers read a 300-word passage twice in succession. The words stuttered for the first time in the second reading were analyzed to determine whether an unusually large proportion of them were adjacent to words stuttered in the first reading. No such tendency was found.