Assessment of Stuttering Severity in Adults and Adolescences in Conversational and Narrative Contexts

Stuttering is a speech disorder in which the flow of speech is disrupted by involuntary repetitions and prolongations of sounds, syllables, words or phrases as well as involuntary silent pauses or blocks.

In the world, approximately 1% of the adult population suffer from stuttering. Stuttering has severe impact on the overall quality of the person's life such as anxiety, stress, shame, low self-esteem and negative affectivity .It also affects his educational attainment, his attractiveness and work life as he avoids employment.

Stuttering varies in severity, frequency and duration from situation to situation. So its dynamics are best understood within discourse contexts that involve interactions with other people. Clinicians typically rely on spontaneous conversational samples for analyzing speech disfluencies. They have good validity, but the use of a more structured form of speech may allow for more efficient, reliable elicitation of stuttering related behaviours and better understanding of the nature of stuttering.

Narration offers a more structured context than conversation because storytellers must weave together information about the characters, the circumstances and actions. Also, narration often contains more complex language than conversation and put the whole responsibility on the speaker for planning and conveying the information to the listener, compared to conversation where two or more speakers co-construct the stream of topics and comments. Thus, narration places more linguistic, cognitive and communicative demands on speakers than does conversation.

A research was done on six adult participants and showed that some of them stuttered more during conversation and others stuttered more during narration.