Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jul 20, 2026
A Psychophysics Paradigm for the Collection and Analysis of Similarity Judgments
Published on: March 1, 2022
Comparing judgments of stuttering made by students, clinicians, and highly experienced judges
Shelley B Brundage1, Anne K Bothe, Amy N Lengeling
1The George Washington University, Department of Speech and Hearing Science, 1922 F St. NW, Suite 406, Washington, DC 20052, United States. brundage@gwu.edu
Purpose:
The purpose of this study was to compare judgments of stuttering made by students and clinicians with previously available judgments made by highly experienced judges in stuttering.
Method:
On two occasions, 41 university students and 31 speech-language pathologists judged the presence or absence of stuttering in each of 216 audiovisually recorded 5-s intervals of the speech of adults who stutter. Intrajudge and interjudge agreement were calculated, and comparisons were made to judgments previously made about the same recordings by 10 highly experienced judges of stuttering.
Results:
Students and clinicians showed similar and relatively high levels of intrajudge and interjudge agreement, but both students and clinicians identified less than half as much stuttering as the highly experienced judges had identified.
Conclusions:
These results replicate previous findings of high agreement coexisting with low accuracy in students' judgments of stuttering, extending those findings to show that similar problems are evident in judgments made by practicing clinicians. Implications include the need for explicit stuttering judgment training programs for both students and practicing clinicians.
Educational Objectives:
After reading this article, the reader will be able to: (1) describe different methods for identifying stuttering and possible problems associated with each method; (2) describe two different methods for reporting interjudge reliability; (3) describe how the identification of stuttering differs for student, clinician, and highly experienced judges.
