Nonfluency, information, and word length

Investigated whether previously reported relationships between nonfluency and information value in 8 undergraduate stutterers' spontaneous speech were mediated by other more basic relationships. Information value was found to be strongly related to word length, but not to sentence position, initial sound, or occurrence of nonfluency. Also, word length was related to nonfluency, suggesting that previous relationships between stuttering and information might have been an artifact of the relationship of both variables to word length. Reexamination of previous data suggests somewhat similar conclusions for stutterers when reading, but not for nonstutterers either reading or speaking. Thus, the properties of nonfluency in stutterers may be somewhat different from those in normals, suggesting that stuttering is not simply a pathological exaggeration of normal nonfluency. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).