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From: Ken Logan
Date: 20 Apr 2010
Time: 15:26:10 -0500
Remote Name: 128.227.98.52
Hi Lisa, I thought I'd chime in a little here. Erin was interested in determining whether her client was "speaking too fast." It is interesting to note that the speech rates of children who stutter are usually slower than those of children who do not stutter. This is because the CWS are generally more disfluent, and the disfluencies eat up time that could otherwise be spent in speaking productively. So, speech rate is correlated with stuttering severity (the more severe the stuttering, the slower the speech rate). A goal in therapy then would be to increase speech rate so that it approximates that of a non-stuttering child (to do so would imply that a child now has fewer and/or shorter disfluencies). The articulation rate, as Lisa said, is computed on fluent stretches of speech. In my experience, this measure is not very meaningful when the stuttering is severe...the reason is that the disfluencies are very frequent, so any stretches of fluent speech that do exist are likely to be very short. We just completed a study recently that compared articulation rates of school-aged CWS and CWNS and found no difference between the two groups. Hope this helps... Ken