Response contingent stimulation (RCS) is known to reduce stuttering in many
cases. Time-out (TO) from speaking after stuttering is a particularly effe
ctive form of RCS. However, the mechanism underlying the TO effect is unkno
wn. The demonstrated value of operant methods in the clinical control of st
uttering in young children warrants renewed interest in exploring why pausi
ng for a short time after stuttering would reduce the frequency of stutteri
ng. In this study, selected linguistic measures were made for two school-ag
e boys whose stuttering reduced during TO in a laboratory study. One boy sh
owed a clear reduction in verbal output, accompanied by a reduction in lexi
cal diversity, but the other boy showed no changes in linguistic measures.
This finding is of interest because, in a previous acoustic analysis of the
same speech samples, the first boy showed no changes in acoustic speech me
asures of duration while the second boy did show changes in acoustic speech
measures of duration. This raises the possibility that people who stutter
may change their verbal output in response to TO, but in different ways. Al
though the present data do not establish a causal relationship between alte
rations in verbal output and reductions in stuttering, they raise the need
for further research that might explain why TO might control stuttering.