Purpose: Stereotypes toward stuttering and people who stutter (PWS) are widespread in the general public irrespective of age, level of education, culture, geographic location and profession. Negative attitudes held by persons of authority like teachers can lead to social, economic and educational obstacles in the lives of PWS. Method: The current…

Semantic differential instruments are often used to assess fluent speakers' attitudes toward people who stutter (PWS). Such instruments are prone to response bias and often lack the power to explain respondents' general impressions of PWS. To address these concerns 149 fluent university students completed an open-ended questionnaire in which they…

Given the well-documented understanding that stuttering behavior elicits stereotypically negative responses from listeners, two experiments explored the equivocal results of earlier investigations concerning the potential for self-acknowledgment and modification of stuttering to elicit positive responses from naive (unfamiliar with stuttering)…

This study examined the effects of the perceived cause of stuttering on perceptions of persons who stutter (PWS) using a 7-item social distance scale, a 25-item adjective pair scale and a 2-item visual analogue scale. Two hundred and four university students rated vignettes which varied on describing a PWS with different causalities for stuttering…

Psychometric properties of the Peer Attitudes Toward Children who Stutter (PATCS) scale (Langevin, M., & Hagler, P. (2004). Development of a scale to measure peer attitudes toward children who stutter. In A.K. Bothe (Ed.), Evidence-based treatment of stuttering: empirical bases and clinical applications (pp. 139-171). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum…

This paper describes several treatment strategies that clinicians can use to address negative affective, behavioral, and cognitive reactions that school-age children who stutter may experience as part of their disorder. Specific strategies include desensitization to stuttering, cognitive restructuring, self-acceptance, purposeful self-disclosure,…

The stereotype of people who stutter is predominantly negative, holding that stutterers are excessively nervous, anxious, and reserved. The anchoring-adjustment hypothesis suggests that the stereotype of stuttering arises from a process of first anchoring the stereotype in personal feelings during times of normal speech disfluency, and then…

A procedure for subtyping individuals who stutter and its relationship to treatment outcome is explored. Twenty-five adult participants of the Comprehensive Stuttering Program (CSP) were classified according to: (1) stuttering severity and (2) severity of negative emotions and cognitions associated with their speech problem. Speech characteristics…

The data of recent research studies have shown that by 3 years of age children show an awareness of dysfluency and that by at least the age of six, youngsters who stutter have a speech-associated attitude that is more negative than that of their peers. These findings led to the present study in which the KiddyCAT, a self-report measure, was used…