Abstract
As discussed in Chapter 1, stuttering is manifested as a unique disturbance in the forward movement, or continuity, of speech—a disturbance in fluency.
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This inference is based on the fact that the studies by Branscom (1942), Davis (1939, 1940), Hughes (1943), and Oxtoby (1943), all directed by Johnson, cite pertinent findings of the relevant early language studies.
The studies by Branscom, Hughes, and Oxtoby were eventually published in a combined version, as chapter 5, “Studies of Nonfluency in Preschool Children,” in W. Johnson, and R. Leutenegger (Eds.), Stuttering in Children and Adults, 1955. Modifications of the reports by Mann, Egland, and Johnson also appear in the same source as, respectively, chapters 7, 6, and 3.
Ibid
The nonfluency of the normally speaking children was eventually described, as “repetitions and hesitations,” when this study was reported “in full” as chapter 3 (same title) in Stuttering in Children and Adults (Johnson & Leutenegger, 1955, p. 67).
Italics mine.
he list might also be criticized for having been developed on adults. Periodically in the literature of stuttering one finds complaint, however valid it may be, that the speech of children should not be assessed in reference to adult level speech.
I should probably include, as part of the nonresearch literature, my own reference to this research (Wingate, 1976, chap. 4). This reference, though brief, stresses the relevance of the normal fluency research to the identification of stuttering.
It is of some interest that definitions and illustrations of Mahl’s categories of “speech disturbances” appeared in a 1963 article in the Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders (Zimbardo, Mahl, & Barnard, 1963). Mahl is one of the earliest and continuing contributors to the study of normal nonfluency (see later in this chapter). Evidently his contribution aroused little interest among persons interested in stuttering, even though this article appeared in a principle publication source for stuttering literature only 2 years after the Johnson publication (Johnson, 1961a) that provided the “disfluency” categories used thereafter in the stuttering-based research. Also, 3 years later Jakobovits (1966), writing in the same journal, called attention to the normal nonfluency research and suggested that research in stuttering should make use of this fund of information. Clearly, the suggestion has been ignored.
heir citations are limited to references dealing with the loci of stutter events.
Italics mine.
The category of “word repetitions” is confounded. Words differ in length, a dimension that is evidently pertinent to the issues considered here. The matter is discussed in Wingate (1976, pp. 42-44).
Actually, the only reason to expect a difference should be posed by the very theoretical position that presses the issue of similarity: to wit, if stuttering develops as a fear of nonfluency (and/or whatever it is associated with) and if stuttering represents the effort to avoid nonfluency (and/or whatever it is associated with) then one should expect the speech of stutterers to contain only stutterings and not the disfluencies of ordinary speech. At the same time, it may eventually be found that certain types of normal non-fluency are associated with different processes in stuttered as compared to normal speech.
See, for example, Johnson (1961b, p. 211, 1963, p. 241) and Johnson and Associates (1959, p. 216).
Or the descriptors later substituted for the latter two, namely “dysrhythmic phonation” and “tense pause.”
These data were taken from a masters thesis by Kools (1956).
Evidently there were no instances of “incomplete phrases” or “tense pauses.”
The article by Abercrombie was originally presented in 1959 as one of four public lectures on Spoken Language. It was later reprinted (1965) in Studies in Phonetics and Linguistics, Oxford University Press.
At the kindergarten level the sample contained 338 children. This number dropped to 260 in the first grade; further attrition decreased the number to 236 at the sixth-grade level.
Italics mine.
Within the spectrum of research interests in stuttering some of the work concerned with loci of stutters and disfluencies can be considered to have made an initial contribution in this direction. However, other areas of research interest in stuttering are affected in one way or another by the limitations discussed in this chapter.
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© 1988 Marcel E. Wingate
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Wingate, M.E. (1988). The Study of Nonfluency. In: The Structure of Stuttering. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-9664-6_2
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