Individual and consensus judgments of disfluency types in the speech of persons who stutter

Previous research has suggested that the reliability with which judges iden tify individual disfluency types, such as repetitions or prolongations of s peech sounds, may be very poor. The use of disfluency types judgments in re search and clinical applications is also complicated by important differenc es among the several disfluency-based characterizations of stuttered speech . In an attempt to address these problems, this study arranged for 30 judge s to identify all disfluency types that they perceived to be present in 5-s audiovisually recorded speech stimuli, each in an Individual task and then with a partner in a Consensus task. Intrapair agreement and interpair agre ement for occurrences of disfluency types (from Consensus conditions) were significantly higher than intrajudge and interjudge agreement for occurrenc es (from Individual conditions). Despite being higher than individual valve s, however, intrapair and interpair agreement for occurrences both averaged less than 50%. Results also showed that disfluency types judgments, interp reted in terms of three common disfluency-based definitions of stuttering, were not strongly related to previous assessments of whether these speech t okens contained or did not contain stuttering. When combined with previousl y available data, the present findings suggest caution in the use of disflu ency types to describe or define stuttered speech.