The differential effect of three auditory stimuli on the frequency of stuttering behaviors

In view of the frequent clinical use of external auditory stimuli in fluency building programs, the purpose of the present experiment was to compare the effects of rhythmic pacing, delayed auditory feedback, and high intensity masking noise on the frequency of stuttering by dysfluency type. Twelve normal hearing young adult stutterers completed an oral reading (approximately 250 syllables) and conversational speech task (3 min) while listening to the three auditory stimuli and during a control condition presented in random order. The results demonstrated that during oral reading all three auditory stimuli were associated with significant reductions in stuttering frequency. However, during conversational speech, only the metronome produced a significant reduction in total stuttering frequency. Individual dysfluency types were not differentially affected by the three auditory stimuli.