An investigation of some aspects of stuttering-like speech in adult dysphasic subjects.

Abstract

Some dimensions of stuttering-like symptoms of five dysphasic patients were considered and compared to several aspects of stuttering which are generally well-known and documented. The nature and amount of the dysfluencies of dysphasia were examined, and, although the amount of non-fluency appeared to justify the label of stuttering, the nature of the dysfluencies was much like that observed in normal speakers and not that considered to be the distinguishing features of stuttering. The loci of the dysfluencies in the sequence of dysphasic speech were investigated and the majority of subjects were found to experience more difficulty on the function words of language rather than on the content or lexical words which precipitate dysfluency in stutterers. All subjects experienced the greatest difficulty on words in the initial position in the sentence as is found with stutterers. For most of the subjects the frequency of dysfluency was highest on longer words and it was observed that subjects generally experienced more difficulty on consonants than on vowels. Under conditions of propositionality it seemed that there was some increase in the frequency and severity of the dysfluencies of dysphasics while the adaptation task yielded divergent results.