Abstract
The principle objective of this research was to investigate certain dimensions of language function in stuttering and to identify probable interrelationships among them. A second, related, objective was to obtain data on normal nonfluency and stuttering, and the relationship of these two phenomena to certain structural aspects of the language. Results bearing primarily on the principal objective of the research will be presented in the first section of the chapter. The data most pertinent to issues of fluency will be presented in the second section.
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Footnotes
On the first and second word-fluency administrations respectively: “stutter” appeared in the lists of seven and four stutterers; three and five normals. “Speech” occurred in the lists of one and two stutterers; six and three normals.
The “Common” were those listed among the most common by Russell and Jen-kins (1954); the “Different” words were those classifiable as “heterogenous;” see Chapter 7.
Homogenous associations are more typical in the general population (see, for example, Deese [1962]; Ervin [1961]).
If broadly based normative association data were available for such lists, stutterers would give more uncommon associations to words in these lists, too.
One should have expected the opposite here too if it is true, as is often claimed, that stutterers have a need to express themselves that is suppressed by a reluctance to talk.
This is not a simple average value. Except for one pair, every stutterer used more total words, and more different words, than his comparison normal speaker.
Mann (1944) reported the same finding in comparing her large (2,800-word) written samples to the comparably large (3,000-word) oral samples obtained by H. Fairbanks. The finding held for comparisons of both normal college-student subjects and hospitalized schizophrenics, although different subjects participated in the two studies.
An incidental contribution of this research, of considerable significance, is that similar findings have been found in at least three languages so far: English, French, and Dutch.
And the schizophrenic subjects in the Mann (1944) and H. Fairbanks (1944) studies.
The claim that stutterers know many synonyms as a means of avoiding stuttering. Moreover, none of the stutterer subjects in this study made this claim. (In my experience stutterers rarely do.)
It is appropriate to note at this point that, overall, the stutterers also produced more written errors (corrected and uncorrected combined), and that the difference approached statistical significance (p =.08).
The complete correlation matrices are included in the Appendix as Tables 8.4A and 8.5A
Grammatical class (principally the content/function word distinction) has shown the most stable relationship to stutter occurrence. As discussed in Chapter 5, grammatical class overlaps the other language factors. Special attention is directed to initial phone because of its focal and consistent concurrence with stutter events.
This part of the research was published as a separate article (Wingate, 1984b). 15This information also has value relative to the sequelae of other kinds of dis-fluencies, identified in this chapter. Incidently, the “marker” concept of stuttering, presented in several places earlier in the book, also directs attention to sequelae.
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© 1988 Marcel E. Wingate
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Wingate, M.E. (1988). Results and Discussion. In: The Structure of Stuttering. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-9664-6_8
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