Speech rhythm in Kannada speaking adults who stutter

Abstract

Purpose: A longstanding hypothesis about the underlying mechanisms of stuttering suggests that speech disfluencies may be associated with problems in timing and temporal patterning of speech events.

Method: Fifteen adults who do and do not stutter read five sentences, and from these, the vocalic and consonantal durations were measured. Using these, pairwise variability index (raw PVI for consonantal intervals and normalised PVI for vocalic intervals) and interval based rhythm metrics (PercV, DeltaC, DeltaV, VarcoC and VarcoV) were calculated for all the participants.

Result: Findings suggested higher mean values in adults who stutter when compared to adults who do not stutter for all the rhythm metrics except for VarcoV. Further, statistically significant difference between the two groups was found for all the rhythm metrics except for VarcoV.

Conclusion: Combining the present results with consistent prior findings based on rhythm deficits in children and adults who stutter, there appears to be strong empirical support for the hypothesis that individuals who stutter may have deficits in generation of rhythmic speech patterns.

Keywords: Stuttering; acoustic analysis; pairwise variability index; prosody; rhythm.