Tone influence and word boundaries in stuttering and fluent adolescents and adults.

Background: this study examines the linguistic features that may influence the occurrence of speech boundaries in fluent and stuttering individuals.

Aim: the study seeks to examine the influences of tone and position in a word on the occurrence of speech boundaries in stuttering and fluent adolescents and adults.

Method: one hundred and twenty individuals took part in this study, both male and female, with ages between 12.0 and 49.11 years old, and were divided into 4 groups: research group 1 (RG1), with 30 stuttering adolescents; research group 2 (RG2), with 30 stuttering adults; control group 1 (CG1), with 30 fluent adolescents; and control group 2 (GC2), with 30 fluent adults. Speech samples containing 200 fluent syllables were collected. In the speech samples, the broken syllables were analyzed according to their tone (unstressed, pre-stressed or stressed) and according to the position in the word (initial, middle or final syllable).

Results: for tone, there was no statistically significant difference in the number of boundaries between the evaluated tones for any of the tested groups. For the location of the broken syllable, there was a predominance of broken syllables in the initial position of words for the stuttering groups of speakers. For the fluent groups, the ruptures were more frequent in the final syllable.

Conclusion: the results of this study reinforce the theory that broken speech is mainly a consequence of slow phonological coding and a corresponding slowness in the building up and recovery of the phonetic plan.