Acoustic analysis and perception of vowels in children's and teenagers' stuttered speech

The syllable repetitions of 24 child and eight teenage stutterers were investigated to assess whether the vowels neutralize and, if so, what causes this. In both groups of speakers, the vowel in CV syllable repetitions and the following fluent vowel were excised from conversational speech samples. Acoustic analyses showed the formant frequencies of vowels in syllable repetitions to be appropriate for the intended vowel and the duration of the dysfluent vowels to be shorter than those of the fluent vowels for both groups of speakers. The intensity of the fluent vowels was greater than that of the dysfluent vowels for the teenagers but not the children: For both age groups, excitation waveforms obtained by inverse filtering showed that the excitation spectra associated with dysfluent vowels fell off more rapidly with frequency than did those associated with the fluent vowels. The fundamental frequency of the children's dysfluent speech was higher than their fluent speech while there was no difference in the teenager's speech. The relationship between the intensities of the glottal volume velocities was the same as that of the speech waveforms. Perceptual tests were also conducted to assess whether duration and the differences found in the source excitation would make children's vowels sound neutral. The experiments show that in children neither vowel duration nor fundamental frequency differences cause the vowels to be perceived as neutral. The results suggest that the low intensity and characteristics of the source of excitation which cause vowels to sound neutral may only occur in late childhood. Furthermore, monitoring stuttered speech for the emergence of neutral vowels may be a way of indexing the progress of the disorder.