FluencyBank English Voices-CWS Corpus

	Nan Bernstein Ratner Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences University of Maryland nratner@umd.edu website
	Courtney Luckman Margulis Speech and Hearing Sciences New York University cluckman@umd.edu
	Mark Baer mark.d.baer@gmail.com

Browsable transcripts

Downloadable transcripts

Link to media folder

Citation information

Bernstein-Ratner, N., & MacWhinney, B. (2018). Fluency Bank: A new resource for fluency research and practice. Journal of Fluency Disorders, 56, 69-80. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfludis.2018.03.002 PMC 5986295

In accordance with TalkBank rules, any use of data from this corpus must be accompanied by at least one of the above references.

Project Description

The transcripts and video clips that you can view and download from the three links given above were gathered by Nan Bernstein Ratner to assist students in learning more about the behaviors and affective/cognitive features of living with stuttering as a child. We want to gratefully acknowledge the support and assistance of Lee Caggiano and Friends (https://www.friendswhostutter.org/), and of the National Stuttering Association (https://westutter.org/). Both of these organizations approved our recruitment of volunteers at their national annual meetings.

Each child participant completed an interview (int) and a reading task (rdg). The reading task involved grade-appropriate readings from the Stuttering Severity Instrument-4 (SSI-4), thanks to permissions granted by the publisher (www.proedinc.com). Beginning in 2021, children/teens were also asked to fill out copies of the OASES-C/OASES-T, depending upon age. These forms were completed but not scored to enable student practice. OASES forms are made available thanks to a donation from Stuttering Therapy Resources, Inc. (www.StutteringTherapyResources.com). Forms should not be used except in conjunction with teaching activities and the FluencyBank Voices project. New forms and scoring instructions are available at StutteringTherapyResources.com. Researchers who use these materials are asked to cite: Yaruss, J.S., & Quesal. R.W. (2016). Overall Assessment of the Speaker’s Experience of Stuttering (OASES). Stuttering Therapy Resources.

OASES is described in this article: Yaruss, J. S., & Quesal, R. W. (2006). Overall Assessment of the Speaker's Experience of Stuttering (OASES): Documenting multiple outcomes in stuttering treatment. Journal of Fluency Disorders, 31(2), 90-115. doi:10.1016/j.jfludis.2006.02.002

During the interview, the children were asked the following questions:

1. Tell me about some of the things you've been doing at the friends meeting so far.
2. Do you know why your family decided to come here?
3. Have you met any kids here?
4. Can you tell me about your talking?
5. What have you learned about stuttering?
6. Have you had speech therapy? Is there anything you'd like to say to people who want to become speech therapists? What could they do that would help you the most?

Suggested activities for these transcripts include:

1. Practice with fluency assessment. It is well-known that transcribers disagree substantially when coding the same passage of stuttered speech, in terms of presence/absence of disfluency, location as well as type of fluency behaviors. Instructors may want to assign the same participant to be coded by multiple students (or an entire class of students). Discuss how listeners may agree or disagree on the behavioral features of stuttering, as well as behaviors that appear to be stutter-like or more typical disfluency.
2. Practice with scoring of the Stuttering Severity Instrument (SSI, https://www.proedinc.com/Products/13025/ssi4-stuttering-severity- instrument--fourth-edition.aspx ). You may choose to contrast patterns of stuttering that are seen when children read, in contrast to their conversational speech.
3. Practice with OASES scoring. For a given participant, consult OASES scoring guidelines which must be purchased from here . How would you characterize the impact of stuttering on this participant? Can you identify impacts that should influence therapy goals? How might you address these impacts?
4. Practice with contrasting behavioral and affective/cognitive aspects of stuttering in children. Assess the degree to which individuals' behavioral profiles match the impacts of stuttering on their lives. Are the impacts of stuttering clearly linked to the frequency or severity of stuttered events in a person's speech? Discuss.
5. Listen to the answers that children gave to the 6 questions. Are there similar threads? Are there clear differences in their opinions? How might responses to these questions shape further mutual goal setting for therapy?
6. Compare profiles of volunteers in the Voices of Children who Stutter project and volunteers in the Voices of Adult who Stutter project (https://fluency.talkbank.org/teaching/AWS.html)