The effect of stuttering on communication: A preliminary investigation

Abstract

This paper describes a study in which Systemic Functional Linguistics was applied to describe how people who stutter use language. The aim of the study was to determine and describe any differences in language use between a group of 10 adults who stutter and 10 matched normally‐fluent speakers. In addition to formal linguistic analyses, analyses drawn from Systemic Functional Linguistics were used to further investigate the expression of both syntactic and semantic complexity. The findings from this study replicated previous findings of Packman et al. in which they found that the language used by people who stutter was significantly less complex than the control group. Another major finding was that adults who stuttered used the linguistic resource of modality significantly less than the normally‐fluent matched peers. The implications these strategies have on communication and social participation will be discussed.

• Stuttering
• linguistic complexity
• Systemic Functional Linguistics
• modality

Notes

Notes

1. According to Cohen (1969) it is preferable to use a pooled estimate of standard deviation rather than the control group standard deviation unless the control group is very large.

2. The minus sign (−) indicates the direction of the effect only and does not mean that there is a negative effect. It is an artefact of the calculation and simply indicative of a larger score being taken from a smaller score in the effect size calculation.

3. Whole word repetitions were included in the total word count for both stuttering and fluent participants.