Communication restriction in adults who stutter: Part III

ABSTRACT

This is the third article in a series examining communication restriction in adults with stuttering (AWS). The aim was to explore interpersonal communication behaviour in AWS at long-term treatment follow-up, using systemic functional linguistics (SFL) as an analytical framework. The performance of 10 AWS within 10-minute conversation samples was compared across pretreatment (T1), post-treatment (T2), and 12-month follow-up (T3), in terms of language productivity and complexity, modality, and appraisal. At T1 and T3, comparisons were also made to a control group (AWNS). Post-treatment increases in (1) language complexity, (2) frequency of modal operators, and (3) expression of appraisal were maintained in the AWS group at T3. No significant differences in these areas were found between AWS and AWNS at T3. The findings suggest that intensive comprehensive stuttering treatment can affect lasting functional change in interpersonal language use for AWS.

KEYWORDS:

• Communication restriction
• intensive treatment
• long-term follow-up
• stuttering
• systemic functional linguistics

Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge Professor Michael Blomgren for his assistance with access to participants for this study.

Declaration of interests

The authors report no conflicts of interest.

Notes

¹ The term ‘language use’ here refers to behaviours by which speakers intentionally employ particular linguistic structures for communication functions (e.g., specific word choices, forms of expression that govern politeness and social appropriateness, sentence structure to highlight selected content).

² Subordination index is a measure taken from the Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts – New Zealand (SALT-NZ; Gillon & Westerveld, 2008) software, defined as the average number of clauses per C-unit. Grammatical intricacy is an SFL-based linguistic complexity index defined as the mean number of clauses per clause complex (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004). Refer to Lee et al. (2015) for further explanation of SALT-NZ and SFL terminology.

³ It was thought important to rule out underlying receptive language difficulty at the outset of the study, as a precursor to the expressive language analyses which formed the primary focus of the study. The PPVT provided a simple, easily administered means of achieving this by assessing receptive vocabulary.