Is Listener Comfort a Viable Construct in Stuttering Research?

Abstract

This article reports the development of a tool for measuring how comfortable a person feels when communicating with someone who has undergone treatment for stuttering. The person rates the speaker on a 9-point Listener Comfort Scale (9 = extremely comfortable, 1 = extremely uncomfortable). In a preliminary investigation of the reliability and validity of the scale, 15 unsophisticated listeners rated video recordings of 10 adults before and after a prolonged-speech treatment for stuttering and of 10 matched controls. The results were compared with those of another 15 listeners who rated the same recordings with the widely used 9-point Speech Naturalness Scale (R. R. Martin, S. K. Haroldson, & K. A. Triden, 1984). Results showed that reliability of the Speech Naturalness Scale was superior to the Listener Comfort Scale, although users of both scales were able to distinguish between pretreatment speech, posttreatment speech, and the speech of controls. The results suggest that the Listener Comfort Scale captures information that is somewhat different than the information captured by the Speech Naturalness Scale. The authors concluded that the concept of listener comfort is a potentially useful additional way of investigating the social validity of behavioral treatments for stuttering.

Listener perceptions of stuttering across two presentation modes: A quantitative and qualitative approach

“…The relevance of the statements about eye contact is not clear other than a few listeners noticed the unusual eye movement pattern caused by the speaker reading the text of the passage that was positioned above the camera. Relative to listeners' comfort level in listening to stuttering, data from the present study support the conclusions reached by O'Brian et al (2003). Their study focused on listener perceptions of pre-and post-treatment speech of people who stutter and suggested that using an audiovisual sample was more socially valid than using audio-only samples.…”

“…Unfortunately, quantitative data may provide a narrow perceptual perspective and limit the amount of potentially valuable information gathered about listener perceptions, especially when researching a complex and multidimensional speech disorder such as stuttering (Tetnowski & Damico, 2001). Quantitative measures that address listeners' scaled ratings of the speech characteristics of a speaker such as a disfluent speaker's competence, speaker-listener interactions, or a listener's comfort in listening to and interacting with a disfluent speaker (O'Brian, Packman, Onslow, Cream, O'Brian & Bastock, 2003) could provide a broader dimension to a listener's perception of stuttering than simply identifying stuttering moments, the severity of stuttering or the naturalness of the speech.…”

Perceptual aspects of cluttered speech

“…As was the case in this investigation, numerous studies (e.g., Kalinowski et al, 1994;Mackey et al, 1997;Martin & Haroldson, 1992;Martin et al, 1984;O'Brian et al, 2003) have found that judges attain a reasonable degree of consistency in judgment of naturalness. Comparing this study to those, we do not know if listeners attend to the same dimensions of cluttered speech as in stuttered speech.…”

“…Rating forms consisted of one sheet of paper with numbered lines for listeners to write their judgments of each sample on 1 to 9 equal appearing interval scales. We employed a 9-point scale to make our findings comparable to most others that have measured naturalness and related phenomena (e.g., Mackey et al, 1997;Martin et al, 1984;O'Brian et al, 2003;St. Louis, 1995).…”

“…That is, it is possible that one person who stutters can be quite abnormally disfluent but still sound more natural than another person who stutters with minimal stuttering. Speech naturalness has been used to clinically examine as well as empirically study stuttered speech in numerous investigations (e.g., Franken, Boves, Peters, & Webster, 1995;Ingham & Packman, 1978;Kalinowski, Noble, Armson, & Stuart, 1994;Mackey, Finn, & Ingham, 1997;Martin & Haroldson, 1992;Metz, Shiavetti, & Sacco, 1990;O'Brian, Packman, Onslow, Cream, O'Brian, & Bastock, 2003).…”