Background: People who stutter are often acutely aware that their speech disruptions, halted communication, and aberrant struggle behaviours evoke reactions in communication partners. Considering that eye gaze behaviours have emotional, cognitive, and pragmatic overtones for communicative interactions and that previous studies have indicated…

Background: Previous studies have found simultaneous increases in skin conductance response and decreases in heart rate when normally fluent speakers watched and listened to stuttered speech compared with fluent speech, suggesting that stuttering induces arousal and emotional unpleasantness in listeners. However, physiological responses of persons…

Background: Stuttering is prone to strike during speech initiation more so than at any other point in an utterance. The use of auditory feedback (AAF) has been found to produce robust decreases in the stuttering frequency by creating an electronic rendition of choral speech (i.e., speaking in unison). However, AAF requires users to self-initiate…

Background: People who stutter produce speech that is characterized by intermittent, involuntary part-word repetitions and prolongations. In addition to these signature acoustic manifestations, those who stutter often display repetitive and fixated behaviours outside the speech producing mechanism (e.g. in the head, arm, fingers, nares, etc.).…

Background: Bloodstein reviewed hundreds of studies that investigated the efficacy of therapeutic protocols for ameliorating the stuttering syndrome. Surprisingly, almost all were effective in significantly reducing overtly perceptible behaviours such as repetitions and prolongations of speech sounds. These results seem highly improbable…

Background: Similar positive results (e.g. immediate decreases in stuttering frequency and a 60-80% recovery rate from stuttering) have been reported for numerous therapeutic protocols for treating childhood stuttering, many of which have been diametrically opposite in their orientations and implementations. For example, Johnson advocated indirect…

Background: Speech and language therapists treating children who stutter appear to be assigned a difficult task. Natural spontaneous remission accounts for approximately 60-80% of all children recovering from stuttering. Despite our best efforts, no protocol has ever shown its effectiveness separate from natural recovery rates (i.e. 60-80%).…

Self-contained ear-level devices delivering altered auditory feedback (AAF) for the application with those who stutter have only been recently developed. The paper examines the first therapeutic application of self-contained ear-level devices in three experiments. The effect of the device on the proportion of stuttered syllables and speech…