Loci of Disfluencies in the Speech of Nonstutterers During Oral Reading

Abstract
The purpose of the present study was to determine whether “disfluencies” in the speech of nonstutterers occur most frequently on words possessing the four linguistic attributes which Brown (1945) reported were related to the occurrence of “stutterings” in the speech of his stutterers. A group of 24 male nonstutterers, ranging in age from 18 to 34 years, read the same 1000-word passage used by Brown. All words judged to have been spoken disfluently, a total of 226, were analyzed for the presence of Brown’s four word characteristics, i.e., initial phoneme, grammatical function, sentence position, and word length. Disfluencies were not randomly distributed in the speech of these nonstutterers. Disfluencies occurred most frequently on words possessing the same attributes (except sentence position) as the words on which Brown reported his stutterers stuttered. The findings of this study demonstrate the essential similarity of the loci of the normal speaker’s disfluencies and the stutterer’s “stutterings.”

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