Dean E. Williams

Speech clinician's stereotypes of elementary-school boys who stutter

Abstract All 174 speech clinicians employed by schools in the state of Iowa were asked to list all words, adjectives, or traits which they felt were needed to describe adequately elementary school-age boys who stutter. Of the 174 clinicians, 127 responded. Ninety-three University of Iowa students then judged the desirability or undesirability of the traits most frequently mentioned by the clinicians. Analysis of the results indicated the following: 1. (1) Speech clinicians assigned a relatively large number of descriptive items to stuttering boys. 2. (2) The median number of items mentioned tended to increase with clinical experience. 3. (3) Male and female clinicians were more similar than they were different in the traits they assigned. 4. (4) Speech clinicians demonstrated a relatively high degree of consensus in the assignment of traits. 5. (5) The 26 most frequently mentioned traits indicated a tendency to describe stuttering boys in terms of personality characteristics rather than in terms of physical structure and appearance or mental abilities. 6. (6) Of the 26 most frequently mentioned items, 17 were evaluated as undesirable and 9 were evaluated as desirable.

The relationship between stuttering and academic achievement in children

Abstract Two onvestigations were made of the academic achievement of young stutterers as measured by the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills. When stuttering children in grade six were compared with matched nonstuttering controls, it was found that the stutterers, as a group, were academically retarded in relation to the nonstutterers, although the score ranges for the two groups were essentially the same. When changes in academic achievement which occurred between grade four and grade eight were examined for a group of stutterers and a group of nonstutterers, the only area in which the stutterers appeared to “catch up” to the nonstutterers was Language Skills. Factors which may possibly contribute to the observed academic retardation in stutterers are listed and discussed. It is suggested that changes in academic achievement level may be brought about through manipulation of the young stutterers academic environment.

A comparison of stuttering and nonstuttering children in terms of five measures of oral language development

Abstract Twenty-two kindergarten and first-grade children who had been identified as having a stuttering problem and their nonstuttering matched controls individually told stories in response to each of the ten Childrens Apperception Test cards. A 50-utterance sample was abstracted for each subject from his tape recorded responses to these cards. The following scores were then computed for each subject: (1) number of one-word responses, (2) mean length of response, (3) standard deviation of the mean length of response, (4) mean of the five longest responses, and (5) structural complexity score. The mean scores for the stutterers were smaller for all measures than corresponding mean scores for the nonstutterers, with the exception of the number of one-word responses. On the average, the stutterers produced approximately twice as many one-word responses as did the nonstutterers. This difference was statistically significant. Implications of the findings are discussed.

Loci of Disfluencies in the Speech of Stutterers

A group of 15 male stutterers read a 1000-word passage. Words spoken disfluently were analyzed for the presence of Browns four word characteristics. The same pattern of loci of occurrence was observed as was reported by Brown in a similar study in which the analyses were based on stuttering counts rather than on disfluency counts. Several implications of this finding are discussed.

Coping with Attitudes and Beliefs about Stuttering

A childs viewpoint about communication—about talking, and especially about his role as a talker—comes about not only because of the ways he talks, but particularly because of the reactions of others to him. First, I discuss what the clinician can do to deal with the childs important listeners. Secondly, I present an approach by which the clinician can help the child develop a realistic attitude about talking.

Performance of Stutterers on a Single-Word Adaptation Task

2 studies of stuttering adaptation are reported in which the task consisted of consecutive oral repetitions of a word which was initially stuttered. The majority of Ss did not remain fluent once they became fluent but exhibited frequently alternating periods of fluency and stuttering. Several interpretations of this finding are suggested.