Parental Severity Scaling of Early Stuttered Speech: Four Case Studies

Abstract

Some distinctive characteristics of cases of early stuttering suggest that a recurring, convenient and unobtrusive measurement procedure might be beneficial during clinical management. The present study investigated the reliability of a parent-based 10-point scale for measuring stuttering severity in four preschool-age stuttering children. For each child, listening tapes were constructed that consisted of around 24 speech samples, from everyday speaking situations, over a period of six days. Each parent used the severity scale to rate the speech samples on their child's listening tape. A clinician also scored the severity of the samples on the listening tapes using the same scale. Results indicated that, for two parents, extremely high agreement with the clinician's severity scores was achieved. Extremely high consistency scores were achieved by one of the parents, and also by the clinician when rating the speech samples of two of the children. To a considerable extent, clinician and parent severity scores rank ordered the speech samples in a similar fashion to a stuttering-count measure. Results are discussed in terms of the reliability, validity, and utility of the 10-point parental severity scaling procedure.