PERCEPTUAL EVALUATION OF THE SPEECH BEFORE AND AFTER FLUENCY SHAPING STUTTERING THERAPY

An often-cited criterion for assessing the effect of a stuttering ther apy is the ability of the stutterers to produce normally fluent speech . Many modern stuttering therapies use special techniques that may pro duce stutter-free speech that does not sound completely normal. The pr esent study investigates this problem in the framework of the Dutch ad aptation of the Precision Fluency Shaping Program. Pre-, post-, and 1/ 2-year follow-up therapy speech samples of 32 severe stutterers who we re treated in a four-week intensive therapy are compared with comparab le samples of 20 nonstutterers. For that aim the samples were rated on 14 bipolar scales by groups of about 20 listeners. The results show t hat the speech of the stutterers in all three conditions differs signi ficantly from the speech of the nonstutterers. The pretherapy speech t akes an extreme position on a Distorted Speech dimension, due to the l arge proportion of disfluencies. The posttherapy speech has extremely low scores on a Dynamics/Prosody dimension, while the follow-up therap y speech differs from the normal speech on both dimensions, but now th e distances are smaller. These results are discussed in relation to th e severity of the stuttering problem in the group of treated stutterer s. Finally, implications for future research on therapy evaluation are discussed.