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Speech can be described either in terms of acoustics, as a perceptual outcome, or as a motor event. Central to theories of speech perception and production is an attempt to describe how these aspects of speech are interrelated. The present experiment investigated how the nonstutterers' and stutterers' reproductions of acoustically presented interrogative sentences were influenced by experimental variations of intonation (sentence initial vs. sentence final) and speech rate (normal vs. time compressed). We studied the effects of these stimulus manipulations on the speech rate and fundamental frequency (F0) of 10 adult German-speaking nonstutterers and seven stutterers. Experimental manipulations of intonation and speech rate significantly influenced the syllable duration and speech rate of both normal speakers and stutterers. The fundamental frequency of the subjects' responses were also significantly influenced by the intonation of the stimulus. But the stutterers' increase in F0 for stressed syllables was generally less pronounced than that of nonstutterers. These results imply that (a) the subject not only extract linguistic meaning from intonation but that they also store extragrammatical speech rate information, and (b) the speakers adopt these speech rate variations for their own productions. Generally, these results demonstrate that speech perception is not limited to extracting linguistically invariant information. The results show that speakers actively generate their own prosody and that this generative process is influenced by the prosodic structure of another speaker's antecedent speech. The implications of these results for theories of speech production are discussed.

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This study had two specific aims. The first aim was to investigate whether, during a silent reading task, persons who stutter encode phonological and semantic information move slowly then persons who do not stutter. The second aim was to investigate how the syntactic context of stimulus sentences influences the speed of coding. Fourteen adult persons who stutter and 14 adult persons who do not stutter participated in a self-paced word-by-word reading experiment. While reading a prose text silently, participants monitored target words that were specified before the presentation of the text. The target words to be monitored for were phonologically similar, categorically related, or identical to a cue word. The influence of syntactic information on the word-monitoring reaction time was studied by presenting the text either as normal prose, in a syntactically correct but semantically anomalous version, or in random word order. The results suggest that the two groups are not different with respect to the speed of word identification but that persons who stutter retrieve semantic information more slowly than persons who do not stutter.

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Longer rehearsal times presumably reduce the efficiency of rehearsal and, hence, of short-term recall. The present experiment examined the question as to whether the slower subvocalization rate of people who stutter is correlated with inferior short-term serial recall and recognition performance. Rate of overt articulation was taken as a measure of rehearsal time. Lists of four nonlexical CVC syllables were presented for short-term serial recall and for short-term recognition. Nineteen adults who stutter and 30 nonstutterers participated in the experiment. In the serial reproduction task the subjects who stuttered reproduced significantly fewer items correctly than did nonstutterers. Recognition performance was measured by nonparametric measures of sensitivity and bias as defined in signal detection theory. The stuttering subjects had a significantly lower sensitivity resulting primarily from a higher false alarm rate. Rate of overt articulation was significantly related to one measure of short-term recall but not to the sensitivity of recognition. These results were interpreted as suggesting that people who stutter have slower phonological encoding and rehearsal times, that they make less use of nonphonological forms of coding than do nonstutterers, and that within their phonological system, activation more easily spills over to similar items.

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The hypothesis tested was that stutterers subvocalize more slowly than nonstutterers and that they need more time for the overt production of the fluent parts of their speech. We also investigated whether rate differences could only be observed for those words on which the stutterers expect to stutter. Fifty-nine school children (27 stutterers and 32 nonstutterers) and 19 adults (18 stutterers and 21 nonstutterers) performed a reading task in which a noun was presented together with its definite article. The presentation times of the reading material were controlled by the subjects. Half of the material had to be read silently, the other half orally. In oral reading, only the data from those trials without any indication of disfluencies were used. Dependent variables were presentation times, speech latency, and speech duration. The stutterers' silent presentation times were significantly longer than those of nonstutterers and this difference was significantly greater for children than for adults. In oral reading all stutterers, regardless of age, had longer presentation times, speech latencies, and article durations than the nonstutterers. Some nouns, however, were uttered significantly more rapidly by stutterers than by nonstutterers. These time differences were found to be independent of the stutterers' expectation to stutter. Our results indicate that a strictly motoric explanation of stuttering is inadequate. The data show that the stutterers and nonstutterers differ with respect to the temporal parameters not only during speech execution, but during speech planning as well.

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