PERCEPTUAL ASSESSMENT OF NORMALCY OF SPEECH FOLLOWING STUTTERING THERAPY ROGER J. INGHAM and ANN C. PACKMAN Cumberland College of Health Sciences, Sydney, Australia Stuttering therapy procedures such as rhythmic or ]grolonged speech have been criticized because tffterward the subject may speak fluently but also abnormally. Although assessments of the normalcy of speech behavior have been rare, some recent procedures have included perceptual assessments of certain dimensions of speech behavior. This study reports an evaluation procedure where listeners en- deavored to distinguish between intermingled speech samples obtained from treated stutterers and a peer group of normally fluent speakers. Different groups of listeners were asked to judge the prosody, rate, fluency, and naturalness of posttreatment samples from a group of stutterers treated with a prolonged speech procedure, and it matched peer group of normally fluent speakers. No significant differences were found between the assessments of stutterers and normally fluent speakers. However, when another group of listeners was asked to decide whether the speech samples were from treated stutterers or normal speakers, the stutterers received significantly fewer normal speaker judgments. Interrelationships between the judgment scales were evaluated along with a forced-choice procedure for assessing the normalcy of individual speech samples. A recurring criticism of stuttering therapies that use speech-pattern tech- niques, such as rhythmic speech (Brady, 1971) and prolonged speech (Gol- diamond, 1965), is that the stutterer may achieve fluency at the cost of speak- ing ill all abnomaal manner (Boehmler, 1970; Van Riper, 1971, 1973; Sheehan, 1975, among others). In recent ),ears some therapy programs employing rhyth- mic or prolonged speech have endeavored to solve this problem by incorpo- rating procedures to shape these speech patterns into "normal" speech (for example, Goldiamond, 1965; Ingham, Andrews, and Winkler, 1972; Perkins, 1973a; Ingham and Andrews, 1973). These procedures have, for the most part, provided the stutterer a combination of sustained fluency and speech-rate con- trol. However, research designed to assess whether normal fluency has been achieved in these programs (or, for that matter, in any stuttering therapy pro- gram) has been rare. Two notable exceptions have been in experimental treat- ment studies by Jones and Azrin (1969) and Perkins (1973b; Perkins et al., 1974) in which listeners were asked to make judgments on 1-min speech samples. Jones and Azrin obtained speech samples from a stutterer undergoing a rhythmic treatment procedure: Listeners had to judge whether the sample was "natural" or "unnatural." Perkins evaluated speech behavior of stutterers 63 Downloaded From: http://jslhr.pubs.asha.org/ by University of California, Santa Barbara, Roger Ingham on 04/16/2014