Eliciting Stuttering in School-Age and Adolescent Stutterers in Experimental Settings.

purposeMost neural and physiological research on stuttering focuses on the fluent speech of speakers who stutter due to the difficulty associated with eliciting stuttering reliably in the laboratory. We previously introduced an approach to elicit stuttered speech in the laboratory in adults who stutter. The purpose of this study was to determine whether that approach reliably elicits stuttering in school-age children and teenagers who stutter (CWS/TWS).

methodTwenty-three CWS/TWS participated. A clinical interview was used to identify participant-specific anticipated and unanticipated words in CWS and TWS. Two tasks were administered: (a) a delayed word

resultsThe method yielded, at a group level, a near-equal distribution of unambiguously stuttered and fluent utterances: 42.5% and 45.1%, respectively, in the reading task and 40.5% and 51.4%, respectively, in the question task.

conclusionsThe method presented in this article elicited a comparable amount of unambiguously stuttered and fluent trials in CWS and TWS, at a group level, during two different word production tasks. The inclusion of different tasks supports the generalizability of our approach, which can be used to elicit stuttering in studies that aim to unravel the neural and physiological bases that underlie stuttered speech.