Identifying the Onset and Offset of Stuttering Events

Abstract

This study was designed to investigate the apparent contradiction between recent reports of physiological and interpersonal research on stuttering that claim or imply high agreement levels, and studies of stuttering judgment agreement itself that report much lower agreement levels. Four experienced stuttering researchers in one university department used laser videodisks of spontaneous speech, from persons whose stuttering could be described as mild to severe, to locate the precise onset and offset of individual stuttering events. Results showed a series of interjudge disagreements that raise serious questions about the reliability and validity of stuttering event onset and offset judgments. These results highlight the potentially poor reliability of a measurement procedure that is currently widespread in stuttering research. At the same time, they have isolated some few highly agreed stuttering events that might serve as the basis for the further development of either event-based or interval-based judgment procedures.

How Stuttering Develops: The Multifactorial Dynamic Pathways Theory

“…For example, studies of physiological processes related to fluent and stuttered speech were sometimes questioned because it was suggested that the temporal onsets and offsets of disfluencies were not adequately pinpointed (e.g., Ingham, Cordes, Ingham, & Gow, 1995). Therefore, any conclusions made on the basis of analyses of physiological or other continuous signals were suspect because it was not clear whether they occurred during fluent or disfluent speech.…”

Event‐ and interval‐based measurement of stuttering: a review

“…, Ingham and Cordes , Ingham et al . ), the majority of the selected event‐based studies described judges as experienced (researchers or speech and language therapists—SLT), trained or enrolled in a training programme, as experienced and trained judges were, in general, more reliable than judges with no experience or with no training (Ingham et al . , Cordes and Ingham , , , Einarsdóttir and Ingham ).…”

“…Three of these six studies (Ingham et al . , Finn , Ingham and Cordes ) describe judges as experienced researchers or SLT.…”

“…In this sense, more recent studies that do not analyse the influence of methodological factors (Ingham et al . , Finn , Godinho et al . , Ingham and Cordes ) used experienced judges for agreement purposes based on assumption that, generally, more experienced judges reached better agreement values.…”

Accuracy of parent identification of stuttering occurrence

“…One 5‐s interval of speech may easily include more than one stuttering event. The trade‐off, as Ingham et al (1995) have argued, is that the time interval method bypasses the problems of (1) transcription accuracy (especially from spontaneous speech samples), (2) deciding whether two events, that may partially overlap (or do not overlap) with each other, are related events, and (3) individual differences in judgement reaction time. It also makes it possible to derive intervals of speech that are agreed to be stuttered in order to make comparisons of stuttering identification across groups and studies.…”