Central auditory function in fluent and disfluent normal speakers.
The Synthetic Sentence Identification - Ipsilateral Competing Message (SSI-ICM) test at a -20-dB message-to-competition ratio was used to investigate central auditory function of fluent and disfluent, normally speaking, male college students. The disfluent group consisted of 10 subjects who demonstrated part-word repetitions while speaking extemporaneously. The matched fluent group of 10 subjects had extemporaneous speech containing no part-word repetitions and with speaking times matched to those of the disfluent group. All subjects had intact peripheral hearing skills and no known history of stuttering. As hypothesized, the disfluent normal speakers had lower scores on the SSI-ICM test than did the fluent normal speakers. It was suggested that a central auditory variable may be one of the factors contributing to the production of disfluent speech at the level of syllable production. It was further suggested that this relationship is not one limited to the clinical or stuttering population as suggested by the design of previous research.