• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.53-64
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• 2021

According to Demand and Capacity Model (DCM), external and internal environments influence the disfluency of children who stutter (CWS). This study investigated the effects of simultaneous changes in motoric and linguistic demands on CWS and children who do not stutter (CWNS). Participants were 4-6 years old CWS and CWNS. A sentence imitation task with changes in speech rate, utterance length, and sentence complexity was used to examine their effects on children's disfluency. When the utterance length changed, CWS showed more disfluency regardless of utterance length and as the speech rate changed, CWS showed more disfluency at fast speech rate than CWNS. When the utterance length and speech rate changed, at fast speech rate, CWS showed more disfluency in both utterances than CWNS. When sentence complexity changed, CWS showed more disfluency than CWNS in complex sentences. Changes in linguistic elements such as speech rate, utterance length, and sentence complexity affect disfluency in CWS, especially when they were exposed to faster, longer, and more complex sentences. This indicates that CWS are vulnerable to fast and complex speech motor control and language processing ability than CWNS. Thus, this study suggests that parents and therapists consider both the speech rate and the utterance length when talking with CWS.

• Journal of Music and Human Behavior
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.21-30
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• 2007

Unlike other common forms of speech disorder, such as phonological disorder or dysphonia, stuttering has not been studied within the context of music therapy. Most cases of stuttering display no difficulty in singing, and fluency within the musical structure does not translate to fluency in speech. Hence, musical approach has been generally considered to be ineffective to the treatment of stuttering. However, the fundamentals of music therapy assume its extensive application in treating variety of speech disorders, including the case of stuttering. Presented in this paper are the case studies designed to validate the efficacy of music therapy as a remedy for stuttering. This study enrolled 6 children with stuttering and conducted 20 individual sessions over a period of 10 weeks. The sessions focused on the Melodic Intonation Therapy, Reinforcement of speech rhythm, song writing and singing. Musical elements were structured to enhance the verbal expression and rhythmic senses, as well as to facilitate the initiation of verbal communication. The result is as follows. First, it was noticed that the disfluency had been decreased in before and after of the music therapy in every child although the result was somewhat different depending the child. The overall result of the investigation shows the significant difference statistically. And categorically speaking, the significant difference was checked in the frequency of the stuttering. In the steps of the session, the increase and decrease was happened repeatedly, and then after it was decreased little by little. Secondly, the Communication Attitude was decreased in before and after of the music therapy, and also there was significant difference statistically. although the avoidance behavior was decreased in before and after of the music therapy, the increase and the decrease was repeated irregularly in the steps of session. All the results described above shows that music therapy gives positive effect to decrease in disfluency of stuttering child and also to develop the Communication Attitude. And new possibility and effectiveness can be proposed in the musical approach to the stuttering.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.75-87
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• 2021

The purpose of this study was to investigate, longitudinally, interruption behavior which children who do stutter (CWS), children who do not stutter (CWNS) and their mothers and relationship with disfluency of children showed during interactions with their mothers. Subjects for this study consisted of 2-5 year old CWS (male 2 and female 4), an age-matched group of CWNS (male 3 and female 3), and their mothers. Frequencies of normal disfluency (ND) and abnormal disfluency (AD) in children group and frequency of interruption and simultalk duration in children and mothers group were measured two times (initial visit and 12 months later) over the course of one year. As a result, no significant difference was observed in frequency of interruption and simultalk duration both between two mother groups and between two child groups at initial visit and 12 months later. However, frequency of interruption increased significantly over the course of one year in CWS group. A significant group difference was found in frequency of interruption of mothers but, no significant difference was observed in simultalk duration of mothers at initial visit. In the CWS·mothers group, no factors were related with disfluency of children at initial visit and 12 months later. These findings suggest that interruption is not just negative behavior, and that reducing interruption should be considered in child·parent interaction therapy for CWS.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.67-76
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• 2022

This study aimed to examine Korean listeners' mode of perceiving sound duration as prolongation, whether dichotomous or continuous. Thirty-five Korean participants (17 men and 18 women) listened to the Korean segment /s/, which was lengthened by 0-980ms in 20-ms increments. Then, the participants were asked to rate each version of the sound based on a rating of one to 100 (the closer to 100, the more disfluent). To examine whether listeners perceived durational variations for the fricative segment dichotomously or continuously, a curve was estimated using the best-fitting regression model for the observed data with the highest adjusted R-squared value. The mode of perceiving durational variations for the segment was continuous (or gradient) rather than discontinuous (or dichotomous). No gender difference was found in the mode of perceiving prolongation. However, there was a significant gender difference in that men rated the most disfluent sounds higher than women. The findings of this study were further discussed in relation to the existing literature, and clinical implications for the assessment of stuttering were presented.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.318-326
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• 2011

With the increase of senior population, adults in their manhood and senescence with neurogenic defects also increase as well; thus, it is necessary to conduct foundational research on speech fluency to rehabilitate adults with neurogenic language disorders. Thereupon, this study analyzes the characteristics of speech fluency comparatively by age and sex with the subjects of normal adults in their 50's to 70's. According to the result of collecting language samples from total 90 adults, 30 (15 males, 15 females) in each age group of the 50's, 60's, and 70's and comparing the speech rate and disfluency frequency, first, adults in their 70's showed slower speech rate than those in their 50's or 60's. And those in their 50's, 60's, and 70's indicated no difference in their speech rate by sex. Second, there was no difference in normal disfluency and total disfluency among the adults in the 50's, 60's, and 70's. Also, there was no difference among the age groups by sex, either. Third, there was no correlation between speech rate of all the age groups and disfluency frequency.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.59-67
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• 2023

This study aimed to propose an appropriate evaluation method for the perceived level of speech disfluency based on sound prolongation (i.e., increased duration of segments). To this end, 34 Korean-speaking adults (9 males, 25 females, average age: 32.9 yrs.) participated as raters in this study. The participants listened to sentences containing a total of 25 stimuli with the Korean voiceless fricative /s/ extended by 80-ms increments up to 2,000 ms (i.e., 285 ms, 365 ms., ..., 2,125 ms, 2,205 ms), and evaluated them using an equal-appearing interval scale (EAI, 1-7 points, where 1 represents "normal" and 7 represents "severe"). Subsequently, based on the interval-scale results, the sentence stimuli with the prolonged voiceless fricative corresponding to the mild-to-moderate level (rated as 4 points) were selected as the reference modulus for direct magnitude estimation (DME). After scatter plots were created for the two evaluation results, the relationship between the two measured mean values was analyzed using a curve estimation method for the observed data with the highest R²-value to determine whether a linear or curvilinear approximation fit the data better. A curvilinear relationship between the two evaluation results was indicated, suggesting that DME is a more appropriate evaluation method than the EAI scale for assessing the perceived level of disfluency based on sound prolongation.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.185-195
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• 2006

This study aims to clarify disfluency loci in a neurogenic stuttering group and to examine how the characteristics are different from a developmental stuttering group. For the study, spoken language samples were collected from 11 adults with developmental stuttering and 11 adults with neurogenic stuttering in the course of speaking tasks including reading, monologue and conversation. Using the collected samples, disfluency characteristics of the two groups were to be investigated by analyzing adaptation effect, consistency effect and frequency of disfluency occurrence according to word position, which are related to the occurrence loci of disfluency. Results of this study were as follows: First, while the neurogenic stuttering group did not show any adaptation effect, the developmental stuttering group showed the adaptation effect that the percent of disfluency word reducing as they read the same materials repeatedly. Second, there was no meaningful difference of consistency effect between the two stuttering groups. Third, the neurogenic stuttering group showed more disfluency frequency in final sounds among the word position compared to the developmental stuttering group.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.59-77
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• 2005

The aim of the present study is to investigate how the phonemic characteristics influence on the disfluencies of children and adults who stutter. The participants were 10 children(9 boys and 1 girl) and 10 male adults. After having the participants to read out the Paradise-Fluency Assessment(Sim, Shin & Lee, 2004) passages, each of the productions were divided into syllables and words, and then the frequencies and the ratios of their disfluenceis were analyzed according to the specified phonemic features. In terms of the frequency of the disfluency, the participants stuttered more in the words which start with consonant than vowel. But they showed more disfluencies in the words initiated with vowel than consonant when the ratio of each phoneme's presences were considered. There found different tendencies among the phonemic features related with their disfluencies occuring with ralatively high frequency or ratio. It was difficult to find out the exact relationships among the order of the sound acquisition, phonemic complexity, and the disfluencies. To study the exact influence of the phonemic features upon the disfluencies, it comes important to consider the frequency of the stuttering itself together with the ratio of the disfluencies in which the opportunity of the specific sound's presence was considered. To compare the results of the different studies which has similar purposes, it seems important to consider the tasks and the methodologies in depth.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.63-72
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• 2020

This study aims to develop a video-based smart utterance deep analyser (SUDA) application that analyzes semiautomatically the utterances that child and mother produce during interactions over time. SUDA runs on the platform of Android, iPhones, and tablet PCs, and allows video recording and uploading to server. In this device, user modes are divided into three modes: expert mode, general mode and manager mode. In the expert mode which is useful for speech and language evaluation, the subject's utterances are analyzed semi-automatically by measuring speech and language factors such as disfluency, morpheme, syllable, word, articulation rate and response time, etc. In the general mode, the outcome of utterance analysis is provided in a graph form, and the manger mode is accessed only to the administrator controlling the entire system, such as utterance analysis and video deletion. SUDA helps to reduce clinicians' and researchers' work burden by saving time for utterance analysis. It also helps parents to receive detailed information about speech and language development of their child easily. Further, this device will contribute to building a big longitudinal data enough to explore predictors of stuttering recovery and persistence.