Despite the many reports of stuttering treatment, there is little consensus either on the long term effectiveness of treatment or on which treatments are the most effective. The literature was searched for treatment outcome studies that reported sufficient data to allow a meta-analysis to be conducted. Forty-two studies covering the treatment of a total of 756 stutterers were located. In these studies the typical client was a 25-year-old severe stutterer who received 80 hours of symptom reduction treatment. Most studies used reliable measures of both stuttering and attitude to assess improvement some six months after treatment had ended. Treatment effects were calculated from 116 pre- and posttreatment pairs of measures. Average effect size was 1.3, which indicates that after treatment the groups of stutterers experienced a 1.3 standard deviation improvement in their pretreatment scores. Clearly, stuttering treatments can be beneficial, and the benefits appear comparable to other treatments in the health sciences. Prolonged speech and gentle onset techniques evidenced better gains in the short term and long term than either attitude or airflow techniques. These four seem preferable to any of the other reported treatments and were certainly better than no treatment.

Thirty-six speech-language pathologists participated in a study to evaluate clinicians' preconceptions of persons who stutter. Each rated a designated construct (the normally fluent individual, the mild stutterer, the moderate stutterer, the severe stutterer) using a personality trait scale. Results indicated that clinicians stereotypically assign negative personality traits to all levels of stuttering severity relative to normal. Their ratings further demonstrated that stutterers are generally considered to be a homogeneous group. Differentiation amongst stutterers was made only between the polar ends of the stuttering severity continuum (that is, mild vs. severe). Clinicians' stereotypical trait assignment was not related to their professional experience. Results are discussed with reference to their clinical implications.

Fourteen individuals who stutter and 14 individuals who do not stutter were presented with 10 bursts of white noise to assess the magnitude of their eyeblink responses as a measure of temperament. Both the magnitude of the eyeblink response to the initial noise burst and the mean of the 10 responses were significantly greater for the stuttering group. The Taylor-Johnson Temperament Analysis (R. M. Taylor & L P. Morrison, 1996) did not distinguish between the two groups, but informal follow-up statistics indicated that the Nervous subscale showed a significant group difference. Scores on this subscale were also significantly positively correlated with the magnitude of the startle response. A discriminant analysis demonstrated that although both the startle response and the nervous trait differentiated the two groups, the startle response measures were more powerful in making this differentiation.

No abstract

Many muscles used in speech are small and intimately interconnected. There is a need for anatomical and physiological data which would allow identification of the particular muscle fibers being recorded in electromyographic (EMG) investigations. EMG recordings were taken from eighteen orofacial and mandibular muscles while gestures believed to be specific to each muscle were performed. The anatomic criteria for the placement of the electrodes, the quality of the EMG spikes and interference patterns obtained, and the degree of differentiation of the temporal sequence of activity from that in neighboring muscles were used to decide on the degree of certainty that a particular muscle was being recorded. The appropriateness of each gesture as a stimulus to any muscle was determined on the basis of the level of activation occurring with the gesture relative to other muscles and its degree of variability between subjects.