Severity-Coded Self-Disclosure Cues and Adult Listener Perceptions of an Adolescent Who Stutters: An Exploratory...

Factual self-disclosure of stuttering is associated with more favorable listener perceptions. Whether the overt stuttering heard during a brief opening disclosure changes subsequent judgments of an adolescent speaker remains unclear.

In this nonrandomized between-groups video-vignette study, 778 adults viewed a 17-year-old male who stutters either without disclosure (n = 289) or after a factual self-disclosure cue containing mild (n = 143), moderate (n = 180), or severe (n = 166) overt stuttering. The same 2-min 34-s core speech sample followed every cue. Participants rated six speech skills and 10 personality characteristics. Primary ANCOVAs adjusted for age, sex, and academic or occupational focus; cumulative-logit ordinal models served as sensitivity analyses.

Relative to no disclosure, all three disclosure-cue conditions received more favorable adjusted ratings of intelligibility, fluency, and ease of listening. Disclosure conditions also generally received lower perceived speech-related handicap ratings and were viewed as more relaxed, less fearful, more confident, more outgoing, and more competent. However, the unadjusted pattern suggesting that mild and severe cues outperformed moderate cues was not robust after covariate adjustment.

Across mild, moderate, and severe overt-stuttering disclosure conditions, adult listener ratings were more favorable than in the no-disclosure condition. These findings support factual self-disclosure as a clinically useful self-advocacy option for adolescents who stutter. Future controlled studies should examine whether listener responses vary according to disclosure severity, severity of the subsequent speech sample, and the extent to which those two severity levels correspond.