A study of the linguistic properties of stuttered speech in english in oral reading and in spontaneous speech by an adult Kenyan

Abstract

Stuttering is a speech disorder whose primary characteristics are repetitions of sounds, syllables and words, prolongations and blocks. Secondary behaviour in stuttering refers to the use of avoidance strategies, such as postponement and substitution to conceal stuttering. The two main types of stuttering are developmental and acquired stuttering. This is a case study of an adult developmental stutterer that seeks to investigate the extent to which the major linguistic properties determine the frequency of stuttering in spontaneous and in oral reading. This study drew on Sheehan's Double Approach-Avoidance Theory. The main objectives of this study was to investigate the extent to which the grammatical class, word length and the linguistic context of a word in a sentence determined the frequency with which it was stuttered on in spontaneous speech and in oral reading. The extent to which fluency improves with reading was also investigated. Video recording was used to collect the data.The results showed that more function words were stuttered on than content words in spontaneous speech while the inverse was seen in oral reading. More stuttering was observed on word initial consonant sounds in both spontaneous speech and in oral reading. On word length, more stuttering occurred on short words in spontaneous speech while the reverse was noted in oral reading. The linguistic contexts that recorded high instances of stuttering were the pre-lexical and pre-utterance positions both in spontaneous speech and in oral reading. It also emerged that fluency improved with reading .