Reading rates of stutterers and nonstutterers during silent and oral reading

The purpose of this study was to investigate the differences between the reading rates of stutterers and nonstutterers during both silent and oral reading of fluently spoken words. Ten adult stutterers and 14 nonstutterers were instructed to read two lists of words over four trials each. The first trial of either the first or the second list was a silent reading trial. All the other trials were oral reading trials. The word lists consisted of nouns with word lengths from two to five syllables. The dependent variables were the silent and oral reading times per word and per syllable. The major findings were that stutterers, as compared to nonstutterers, required longer reading times per word and per syllable during both silent and oral reading. These results indicate that stutterers differ from nonstutterers in the basic processing time for verbal material.