Verbal Behavior of Listeners Interacting with a Person Who Stutters

Debora Freud, Ronit Sharir and Ruth Ezrati-Vinacour
Department of Communication Disorders, Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University, Israel.

SUMMARY

The purpose of this study is to investigate (a) whether listeners speak faster to adult PWS than to fluent speakers, and (b) whether listeners interrupt, reinforce and complete PWS’ speech more frequently than fluent speakers’ speech. Ten adult listeners spoke once with an adult PWS and once with a fluent speaker. Analysis of speech samples demonstrated that the listeners spoke faster to the PWS than to the fluent speaker. No significant differences were found between listeners’ interruptions, sentence completion and reinforcement to the two speakers. However, listeners performed more interruptions and sentence completions while the PWS was stuttering than while speaking fluently

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