Does language influence the accuracy of judgments of stuttering in children?

To determine whether stuttering judgment accuracy is influenced by familiarity with the stuttering speaker's language.

Audiovisual 7-min speech samples from nine 3- to 5-year-olds were used. Icelandic children who stutter (CWS), preselected for different levels of stuttering, were subdivided into 5-s intervals. Ten experienced Icelandic speech-language pathologists (ICE-SLPs) and 10 experienced U.S. speech-language pathologists (US-SLPs), the latter being unfamiliar with the Icelandic language, independently judged each 5-s interval (n = 756) as stuttered or nonstuttered on 2 separate occasions.

As in previous studies, intervals judged to contain stuttering showed wide variability within the ICE-SLP and US-SLP groups. However, both SLP groups (a) displayed satisfactory mean intrajudge agreement, (b) met an independent stuttering judgment accuracy criterion test using English-speaking CWS samples, and (c) met an agreement criterion on approximately 90% of their stuttering and nonstuttering judgments on the Icelandic-speaking CWS samples.

Experienced SLPs were shown to be highly accurate in recognizing stuttering and nonstuttering exemplars from young CWS speaking in an unfamiliar language. The findings suggest that judgments of occurrences of stuttering in CWS are not generally language dependent, although some exceptions were noted.