FluencyBank English Sawyer Corpus

Jean Sawyer Communication Sciences and Disorders Illinois State University jsawyer@ilstu.edu

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Citation information

Sawyer, J., Matteson, C., Ou, H., & Nagase, T. (2017). The effects of parent-focused slow relaxed speech intervention on articulation rate, response time latency, and fluency in preschool children who stutter. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 60, 794-809.

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Project Description

This project consisted of 17 children who stutter and their caregivers. Each child was identified as a child who stuttered, and there was a minimum of 3 percent stuttering-like disfluencies in each child’s speech.Most of the caregivers were mothers, but one was a father and one, a grandmother. Children ranged in age from 31-66 months.

There were three visits over three weeks. The first visit was a baseline sample where caregivers were instructed to talk with the child for approximately 15minutes. This visit is labeled as “visit 1.” Caregivers were taught to use slower, relaxed speech, described as speech with slightly elongated vowel sounds, preserving suprasegmental features. Caregivers were encouraged to practice the speech with the child at home. During the second week, caregivers and children returned and the researcher and a student clinician watched the caregiver using slower relaxed speech, giving feedback as necessary.

For the third visit, the caregiver was recorded with the child speaking as they typically would, for about 15 minutes. This visit is labled “visit 2.” Children and caregivers took a 20-minute break and then the caregiver was asked to use slow relaxed speech with the child for approximately 15 minutes. This recording is labeled “visit 2 slow.”