Stuttering, stressed syllables, and word onsets

The relationship of syllabic stress, word onsets, and stuttering was examined on selected words within a set of 40 carefully controlled sentences containing bisyllabic words with contrastive stress. Ten stuttering adults displayed significantly more stuttering on the word-initial syllables than on the subsequent (word-final) syllables, whereas stressed syllables were not stuttered significantly more than unstressed syllables. Participants displayed a greater tendency to stutter on word-onsets than stressed syllables within words. These findings are discussed with respect to potential relationships of stutter events to layers of metrical structure associated with speech production.