Identification of brief pauses in the fluent speech of stutterers and nonstutterers.

Research has indicated that the fluent speech of stutterers is different from normal speech. A previous experiment suggested that part of the difference between the fluent speech of normals and stutterers is to be found in the number of brief pauses, but varying recording gain levels could have affected the measurements. The present paper reports an attempt to resolve the gain problem and to examine brief pauses in the speech waveform. Twenty‐five normal subjects and 25 fluent stutterers were employed as S's. Taped samples of reading were processed, using a computer of average transients as the basic unit. An analysis of variance showed decisively that in our method of processing the speech samples, gain had affected pause length but had done so in the same manner for both stutterers and nonstutterers. There was no interaction. Stutterers were found to have a significantly greater number of pauses 150 to 250 msec long. A simple counter, called a “speech‐pause counter,” was devised that was able to give results as reliable as those of the computer, using a single sample of speech from each subject.