To determine if a stereotype of the “typical stutterer” exists and to identify possible differences in that stereotype due to exposure to stuttering, seven groups of subjects having a wide range of possible exposure to stutterers rated four hypothetical concepts (typical eight-year-old male, typical eight-year-old male stutterer, typical adult male, and typical adult male stutterer) on 25 scales arranged in a semantic differential format. These bipolar scales were derived from words previously judged by speech clinicians as descriptive of stutterers and antonyms of those words. It was concluded that a strong stereotype of a stutterer’s personal characteristics exists, that the stereotype is predominantly unfavorable, that the stereotype is essentially unaffected by amount of exposure to actual stutterers, and that the traits attributed to boys and men who stutter are similar. Some implications of the study are discussed.

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Speech clinicians were asked to write adjectives they felt best described the adult male stutterer. Their responses were compared with the same information obtained about elementary school-aged boys who stutter. Many of the same adjectives were listed for both boys and men, indicating a fairly well established stereotype of a “stutterer,” regardless of age. Furthermore, most of these adjectives were judged to be undesirable personality characteristics for males. When the adjectives were grouped together into broad behavior categories, approximately 75% of the clinicians listed adjectives that grouped within the category of “nervous or fearful,” and 64% listed those that were included in the category of “shy and insecure.” Interestingly, only 31% of the clinicians listed adjectives that reflected “abnormalities in speech.” These data have importance for the clinician who sits for the first time across the clinical desk and begins to work with a stutterer.

One hundred fifty-two children from kindergarten and grades one through six, 76 stutterers and 76 nonstutterers, performed a speech task. Each of the kindergarten and first-grade children repeated 10 sentences after the experimenter, and each of the second- through sixth-grade children read a passage. All words judged to have been spoken disfluently were analyzed for the presence of each of Brown’s four word attributes—initial phoneme, grammatical function, sentence position, and word length. Disfluencies were not randomly distributed in the speech of these children. For both stutterers and nonstutterers, disfluencies occurred most frequently on words possessing the same attributes as those reported by Brown to be troublesome for adult stutterers. The findings of this study demonstrate the essential similarity in the loci of instances of disfluency in the speech of (1) children and adults and (2) stutterers and nonstutterers.