Word familiarity, syllabic stress pattern, and stuttering

The correspondence of stuttering and linguistic characteristics of utterances has led to speculations that a source factor for stutter events is a speaker's inadequate formulation of the speech code. In this study, the effects of word frequency and syllabic stress pattern on stuttering frequency were evaluated using specially designed sentences read orally by 10 adult stutterers and 10 adult nonstutterers. Results revealed statistically significant differences in stuttering frequency between sentences with low and high frequency words, but not between sentences with regular and irregular syllabic stress patterns. The significant rank order correlation between stutterers' word recognition vocabulary scores and amount of stuttering on sentences with high versus low frequency words affirmed that word familiarity, not simply word prominence, is an important factor contributing to the word frequency effect. The outcomes are discussed in relation to current psycholinguistic theories of stuttering, proposing that word access and phonological encoding difficulties could be a source factor that underlies the occurrence of stutter events.