Stuttering is a speech disorder. The flow of speech is disrupted by involuntary repetitions and prolongation of sounds, syllables, words or phrases, and involuntary silent pauses or blocks in communication. Stuttering is an interest subject of researchers from many various domains such as speech physiology & pathology, psychology, acoustic and signal analysis. Thus there are many researchers ha...

Muscle spindles are increasingly recognized as playing a pivotal role in the cause of dystonia. This development and own laryngeal observations that support the idea of causally "well-intentioned" stuttering motivated us to present the following hypothesis: stuttering events compensate for a sensory problem that arises when the abductor/adductor ratio of afferent impulse rates from the posterio...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to see whether participants who persist in their stutter have poorer sensitivity in a backward masking task compared to those participants who recover from their stutter. DESIGN The auditory sensitivity of 30 children who stutter was tested on absolute threshold, simultaneous masking, backward masking with a broadband and with a notched noise masker. Th...

The old saying by Van Riper (with a nod to Winston Churchill), that stuttering is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, is well known. While it would be preposterous for any of us to state that, 40 years later, we now have solved the riddle, we can say with a great degree of confidence that advances in scientific inquiry have brought us closer to understanding the factors that may tri...

BACKGROUND Similar positive results (e.g. immediate decreases in stuttering frequency and a 60-80% recovery rate from stuttering) have been reported for numerous therapeutic protocols for treating childhood stuttering, many of which have been diametrically opposite in their orientations and implementations. For example, Johnson advocated indirect treatments that simply advocated refraining from...

OBJECTIVE Stuttering is a common childhood disorder. There is limited high quality evidence regarding options for best treatment. The aim of the study was to compare the effectiveness of direct treatment with indirect treatment in preschool children who stutter. METHODS In this multicenter randomized controlled trial with an 18 month follow-up, preschool children who stutter who were referred...

OBJECTIVES Information obtained at around age 8 years was used to construct a model that predicted persistence of, and recovery from, stuttering several years later. A logistic regression model that classified children as persistent or recovered at the teenage years using stuttering history and symptom information obtained at around age 8 years was constructed and validated. METHODS A longitu...

BACKGROUND Approximately 1% of children and adolescents, 0.2% of women, and 0.8% of men suffer from stuttering, and lesser numbers from cluttering. Persistent speech fluency disorders often cause lifelong problems in communication and social participation. METHODS In an interdisciplinary, evidence and consensus based clinical practice guideline, the current understanding of the nature, identi...

Title of Document: EFFECTS OF COGNITIVE DEMAND ON WORD ENCODING IN ADULTS WHO STUTTER Pei-Tzu Tsai, Doctor of Philosophy, 2011 Directed By: Professor Nan Bernstein Ratner Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences The etiology of persistent stuttering is unknown, but stuttering has been attributed to multiple potential factors, including difficulty in processing language-related information, but...