Time-interval measurement of stuttering: effects of training with highly agreed or poorly agreed exemplars

This study required six groups of judges, three experimental groups and three control groups (all n = 5), to categorize consecutive 5.0-sec speech intervals as Stuttered or Nonstuttered on four judgment occasions. Between the second and third occasions, each experimental group was trained to categorize correctly one of three sets of speech intervals: agreed intervals, which had been unanimously prejudged to be Stuttered or Nonstuttered; disagreed intervals, which had been prejudged to be Stuttered by approximately half of a large group of judges; or randomly selected intervals, including both agreed and disagreed intervals. Results replicated and extended an earlier finding of improved interjudge agreement for judges trained with highly agreed intervals (Ingham, Cordes, & Gow, 1993): Training with highly agreed intervals was shown to be more effective than equivalent exposure to those intervals without feedback, and training with highly agreed intervals was shown to be more effective than training with, or exposure to, poorly agreed or randomly selected intervals.