1995
Bauer, A., Jäncke, L. & Kalveram, K.Th. (1995a) Mechanical
perturbation of the jaw during stutterers' and nonstutterers' fluent speech. In C.W. Starkweather & H.F.M. Peters (Hrsg.), Proceedings of the First World Congress on Fluency Disorders. 31-34.
Abstract
6 stutterers and 12 normal speakers, all native German speakers, uttered the testword /papapas/ repeatedly in three different speech rates [slow / medium / fast] and two stress patterns [first syllable stressed / unstressed]. In 16.7% randomly chosen trials, a load was applied to the jaw in the direction of the opening movement. Load onset was triggered by the start of the first phonation. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the reaction of the speech motor control system to this unexpected and unpredictable mechanical perturbation depending on suprasegmental speech aspects (stress pattern and speech rate) in stutterers and nonstutterers. Dependent variables were jaw displacements for opening and closing movements and duration of jaw movement as well as duration of phonation. Jaw displacements were not affected significantly by the mechanical perturbation in either stutterers or in nonstutterers, although stutterers reveal a tendency to shorten jaw closing displacements following perturbation. In normal speakers duration of jaw movement and phonation increase following load application only in unstressed syllables and are not influenced by the perturbation in unstressed syllables, whereas stutterers, as a group, reveal a tendency to overcompensate for the perturbation in stressed syllables at slow speech rate since under this prosodic condition duration of phonation is even shortened following perturbation. Furthermore, indications of a discoordination between articulation and phonation in stutterers could be observed at slow speech rate.
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