Effect of communicative stress on the frequency and form-types of disfluent behavior in adult stutterers

Twenty adult stutterers spoke spontaneously for two minutes under each of four monitoring conditions of imposed communicative stress. Results indicated that being heard stuttering (The Auditory Component) is more stressful than being seen stuttering (The Visual Component). This finding applied to the total sample of subjects and for subgroups based on predominant disfluency form-type. In spite of changes in the frequency of molar disruptions, stutterers and stutterer-subgroups evidenced a consistent, stereotyped, molecular stuttering pattern in terms of specific disruption form-types.