Studies in stuttering as a prosodic disturbance.

In two experiments, various aspects of prosody in adult male stutterers and nonstutterers were studied. The results showed that stutterers did not speak with a generally reduced pitch pattern, they were able to place sentence accent correctly but had difficulty executing this prosodic feature, stuttering episodes were located mainly on stressed syllables, a fixed timing pattern of speech enhanced fluency, and the intervals between stressed syllables were more variable in the speech of stutterers, even in symptom-free passages, than in the speech of nonstutterers. Results support the conclusion that stuttering, seen on the symptomatic level of disfluencies produced, is a prosodic disturbance.