Biomedical subjects

R F Curlee

Publications and source records attributed to R F Curlee.

17 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed1995

Effect of utterance length and meaningfulness on the speech initiation times of children who stutter and children who do not stutter.

The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of utterance length and meaningfulness on the speech initiation times of children who stutter and children who do not stutter. Subjects were 36 elementary school students (half of whom stutter, matched by age, grade, and gender). Each child repeated short meaningful, long meaningful, and long nonce utterances in response to a visual cue. Nonstuttering, stuttering-only, and stuttering-plus (children with concomitant speech and/or language problems) children responded differently to utterance length and meaningfulness. This suggests that the three groups may process speech motor events for verbal responses differently.

Child↗

PubMed1991

A theory of neuropsycholinguistic function in stuttering.

A theory of neurolinguistic function is proposed to explain fluency and the production of stuttered and nonstuttered speech disruptions. Central to the theory is the idea that speech involves linguistic and paralinguistic components, each of which is processed by different neural systems that converge on a common output system. Fluent speech requires that these components be integrated in synchrony. When they are dyssynchronous, the result can be either nonstuttered disfluency or stuttering, depending on time pressure. Time pressure is defined as the speaker's need to begin, continue, or accelerate an utterance. Nonstuttered disfluency results when the linguistic and paralinguistic components are dyssynchronous and the speaker is not under time pressure. Stuttering results when the speaker is under time pressure and is relatively unaware of the cause of dyssynchrony. Both of these factors are necessary for the identification of the phenomenon of stuttering. Stuttering is defined as disruption of speech that is experienced by the speaker as a loss of control. The theory presented here accounts for both the disruption and the experienced loss of control.

Biological Evolution↗

PubMed1981

Observer agreement on disfluency and stuttering.

Groups of undergraduate and graduate student listeners identified the stutterings and disfluencies of eight adult male stutters during videotaped samples of their reading and speaking. Stuttering and disfluency loci were assigned to words or to intervals between words. The data indicated that stuttering and disfluency are not too reliable and unambiguous response classes and are not usually assigned to different, nonoverlapping behaviors. Furthermore, judgments of stuttering and disfluency were distributed similarly across words and intervals. For both undergraduate and graduate student listeners, there was relatively low unit-by-unit agreement among listeners and within the same listeners from one judgment session to another.

Adult↗

PubMed1976