Applied prosodic analysis

Stuttering, language, and cognition: A review and a model of stuttering as suprasegmental sentence plan alignment (SPA).

“…Finally, my formulation of the stuttering moment has important empirical and therapeutic implications that have not been raised in the context of existing models. For instance, I would predict that exposing stutterers to the fundamental frequency contour of the to-be-uttered sentence, a technique used in second language training (e.g., Anderson, 1979), will be fluency enhancing and less disturbing to stutterers' speech pattern than are other therapeutic techniques. This possibility and other implications of the SPA model will have to be examined in future research.…”

“…Because word order and other features of sentences, including suprasegmental features, differ across languages, the need for SPA is more likely to occur in the less proficient of one's languages; the more proficient language may dominate at the point of sentence planning, before morpholexical insertion takes place. Research evidence has indicated that the more proficient language does in fact dominate in terms of various features (Kilborn, 1989; Redlinger & Park, 1980), including suprasegmental ones (Anderson, 1979; Meisel, 1980). This would necessarily lead to more online revisions in the less proficient language and, hence, necessitate more suprasegmental alignment processes as well.…”