Communication restriction in adults who stutter: Part II

ABSTRACT

This article presents a follow-up study to Lee, van Dulm, Robb, and Ormond (2015). The aim was to explore communication restriction in adults with stuttering (AWS) using typical language measures and systemic functional linguistics (SFL) analyses. The article compared the pre- and post-treatment performance of AWS in language productivity and complexity, transitivity, modality, appraisal, and theme. Ten-minute conversational samples were obtained from 20 AWS before and after participation in intensive stuttering treatment. Transcripts were analysed for quantity and complexity of verbal output, and frequency of transitivity, modality, appraisal and theme resources. Between pre- and post-treatment, the following differences were observed: (1) a significant increase in frequency of modal operators, and trends approaching significance for (2) increased language complexity (3) increased language expressing appraisal. These changes suggest increased flexibility of language use in AWS following treatment, particularly towards interpersonal engagement. The value of SFL to this area of research is discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Communication restriction
• intensive treatment
• stuttering
• systemic functional linguistics

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest.

Notes

¹ In the current article, the term ‘language use’ refers to the ways in which a speaker intentionally employs the linguistic resources available to him or her for communication purposes (e.g. specific word choices, forms of expression that govern politeness and social appropriateness).

² Grammatical intricacy is an SFL-based linguistic complexity index, defined as the mean number of clauses per clause complex (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004).

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.