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The purpose of this study was to determine how high-school sophomores are likely to react to a peer who substitutes /w/ for /r/. Twenty-six high-school sophomores rated "A classmate who says /w/ when he means to say /r/" and 22 high-school sophomores rated "A typical classmate" on each of 81 semantic differential scales. Analyses of the ratings indicated that a high-school sophomore who substituted /w/ for /r/ would tend to be reacted to negatively. Clinical implications are discussed.

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.

A group of 184 elementary school children, 92 stutterers and 92 matched nonstutterers, performed a speaking task three times consecutively. Kindergarten and first grade children repeated a series of sentences, and the second through sixth grade children read a passage. Both the stutterers and the nonstutterers exhibited the adaptation effect. Both adapted proportionally to approximately the same degree. There was no tendency in either group for the degree of adaptation to vary as a function of grade level. Whether or not a child exhibited the adaptation effect appeared to be more closely related to how disfluent he was on his first performance of the task than to whether he had been labeled as a stutterer or a nonstutterer. Our results indictate that adaptation is not unique to stutterers, but is to be found also in normal speakers. Several implications are discussed.

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