Effects of Disfluency Monitoring Conditions in Adults Who Stutter

Purpose : Monitoring is an essential factor in improving the accuracy of spoken language output. Monitoring disfluency can be done by others or by oneself. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether there is a difference in the frequency of disfluency according to the monitoring conditions mentioned.
Methods : The subjects of this study were 21 stuttering adults who speak under neutral (non-monitoring), self-monitoring, and second-party monitoring conditions. The differences were compared by measuring the syllable rate and speech rate as normal disfluency (ND), abnormal disfluency (AD), and total disfluency (TD). This study verified whether there was a correlation between frequency or speech rate under non-monitoring conditions and other monitoring conditions.
Results : In the self-monitoring condition, the disfluency decreased overall, but was not statistically significant. ND and TD were found to decrease in self-monitoring conditions.
Second, in the second-party monitoring condition, disfluency decreased, while TD decreased statistically. It was found that ND, TD, and speech rate decreased in the other monitoring conditions. Third, AD was statistically significantly more decreased in second-party monitoring conditions than in self-monitoring conditions. Fourth, there was a significant negative correlation between the change in TD and speech rate in the second-party monitoring condition.
Discussion: In the stuttering monitoring condition, disfluency was decreased, but it was difficult to find the same tendency in the whole stuttering group. Since the effect of oral monitoring may vary from subject to subject, it can be used as a basis for establishing an appropriate intervention method for the subject according to the subject's monitoring response characteristics.