Stuttering Consistency in Varied Contexts

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Abstract
The “consistency effect” has been proffered as evidence that stuttering is basically a response to fear-producing stimuli inherent in certain words. To assess consistency in relatively spontaneous speech, each of 16 stutterers gave continuous word associations from which 18 stuttered (experimental) and 18 nonstuttered (control) words matched for length, initial phoneme, and familiarity were selected for each subject. Subjects then produced each of the 36 words in three sentences and read them as a list. The hypothesis to be tested was that significantly more experimental than control words would be restuttered. Grouped totals suggest support for the hypothesis, but inspection of the data reveal that the performance of only a few subjects provided the margin of difference. Moreover, other factors also appear influential in determining the recurrence of stuttering. These results suggest that the term consistency as presently used is misleading, hypotheses concerning stuttering based on the notion of a consistency effect are not tenable, and an account of the loci of repeated occurrences of stuttering must penetrate beyond the word level.

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