Reliability of judgments of stuttering and disfluency in young children's speech

This study examined interjudge agreement levels for two forms of judgments of overt speech characteristics in young children's speech: stuttering and disfluency types. Five experienced adult listeners made judgments of disfluencies and stuttering in samples of eight young children's spontaneous speech on separate occasions with the order of tasks counterbalanced across listeners. Results showed that the interjudge reliability for judgments based on a disfluency taxonomy was not significantly different from that based on stuttering. The high coefficients of reliability for both procedures indicated that subjects would be ranked consistently on the basis of either form of judgment. The importance of both forms of judgments to stuttering treatment and research is discussed.