RELIABILITY OF CLINICIAN JUDGMENTS ABOUT PROLONGED-SPEECH TARGETS

Treatments for stuttering based on variants of Goldiamond's prolonged- speech procedure involve teaching clients to speak with novel speech p atterns. Those speech patterns consist of specific skills, described w ith such terms as soft contacts, gentle onsets, and continuous vocaliz ation. It might be expected that effective client learning of such spe ech skills would be dependent on clinicians ability to reliably identi fy any departures from the correct production of such speech targets. The present study investigated clinicians' reliability in detecting su ch errors during a prolonged-speech treatment program. Results showed questionable intraclinician agreement and poor interclinician agreemen t. Nonetheless, the prolonged-speech program in question is known to b e effective in controlling stuttered speech. The clinical and theoreti cal implications of these findings are discussed.