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STUTTERING

المؤلف:  John Field

المصدر:  Psycholinguistics

الجزء والصفحة:  P291

2025-10-16

726

STUTTERING

A disorder of fluency. It varies considerably between sufferers but presents characteristics which give a sense of strain in the speaker. Symptoms include the repetition of phonemic segments, syllables or words (c-c-computer, com-com-computer, got a-got a-got a brother) and/or an extreme lengthening of segments or syllables (af:::raid). The most typical symptom is a blocking of the airflow, which results in long pauses, effortful speech and distorted facial expressions. There may be a greater than normal use of fillers such as erm or oh to cover, or sometimes anticipate, a gap. The general hesitancy of speech often leads to irregularities of rhythm and intonation and words may be stressed erratically or left incomplete. Sufferers are often aware of their limitations and may circumlocute or use general terms to avoid words that they anticipate will be difficult.

Stuttering thus involves more than difficulty in articulating particular words: there may also be disruption at the stages of phonetic and prosodic planning. The phenomenon has been interpreted in terms of demands and capacities: the demands made by speech upon the speaker’s attentional, linguistic or motor resources exceed what the speaker is capable of.

 A cognitive theory would link stuttering to listening and to self-monitoring. It suggests that there may be split-second delays in the auditory feedback mechanism linking ear, brain and vocal organs, which disrupt the encoding of speech. There have also been neurological explanations, which suggest that a particular type of brain configuration may be the cause or that chemicals within the brain may disrupt the transmission of information across synapses.

See also: Cluttering

Further reading: Crystal and Varley (1999); Dalton and Hardcastle (1989); Wingate (1988)