Pretreatment and Posttreatment Speech Naturalness Ratings of Adults With Mild and Severe Stuttering

Abstract

Speech naturalness of adults who stutter was assessed before and after enrollment in the Precision Fluency Shaping Program. Sixty-four naive raters used a nine-point speech naturalness scale developed by Martin, Haroldson, and Triden (1984) to rate the speech of five adults with mild stuttering and five adults with severe stuttering. The raters assessed 10 1-minute audio samples of clients reading prepared text. Samples were acquired during both pre- and posttreatment assessment. Posttreatment samples were either nearly or completely stutter-free. Posttreatment speech was rated as significantly more unnatural than pretreatment speech for both groups of speakers. This study supports the notion that the reduction of stuttering does not necessarily result in an increase in speech naturalness, and suggests that the goal of treatment should be to produce speech that is both perceptually fluent and natural-sounding.