Reliability of clinicians' judgments about prolonged-speech targets

Treatments for stuttering based on variants of Goldiamond's prolonged-speech procedure involve teaching clients to speak with novel speech patterns. Those speech patterns consist of specific skills, described with such terms as soft contacts, gentle onsets, and continuous vocalization. It might be expected that effective client learning of such speech skills would be dependent on clinicians' ability to reliably identify any departures from the correct production of such speech targets. The present study investigated clinicians' reliability in detecting such errors during a prolonged-speech treatment program. Results showed questionable intraclinician agreement and poor interclinician agreement. Nonetheless, the prolonged-speech program in question is known to be effective in controlling stuttered speech. The clinical and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.