IDENTIFYING THE ONSET AND OFFSET OF STUTTERING EVENTS

This study was designed to investigate the apparent contradiction betw een recent reports of physiological and interpersonal research on stut tering that claim or imply high agreement levels, and studies of stutt ering judgment agreement itself that report much lower agreement level s. Four experienced stuttering researchers in one university departmen t used laser videodisks of spontaneous speech, from persons whose stut tering could be described as mild to severe, to locate the precise ons et and offset of individual stuttering events. Results showed a series of interjudge disagreements that raise serious questions about the re liability and validity of stuttering event onset and offset judgments. These results highlight the potentially poor reliability of a measure ment procedure that is currently widespread in stuttering research. At the same time, they have isolated some few highly agreed stuttering e vents that might serve as the basis for the further development of eit her event-based or interval-based judgment procedures.