Stuttering: Frequency distribution of stuttering severity

Blog background

I have been deeply involved in sharing my understanding with fellow stutterers, speech and language pathologists and researchers, especially in the 90's. The older part of this blog reports some the discussions I was having on a professional list at that time. Most of the discussions are still relevant today.

I remained involved in the stuttering community, mostly as participant in activities of the National Stuttering Association (NSA), and occasional workshop leader. Since my retirement I have returned to writing, and I just developed an audio course on fluency improvement. A link for the course can be found in this blog, as well as posts based on more recent discussions I am having in a Stuttering Facebook group.

Friday, November 04, 1994

Frequency distribution of stuttering severity

I asked about the statistics of stuttering severity. The answer by Woody Starkweather (Temple University) is that, as for "neary all" disorder severities the distribution is right-skewed with many mild stutteres and few severe ones.

A single number index of stuttering severity has been developed. It's called PDST (Percent Disfluent Speech Time) and it includes "possibly most" elements of stuttering severity. It is computed by dividing the sum of the times of stuttering behavior durations by the total duration of speech time.

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Biography

Dr. Colombano is a retired NASA scientist with a Ph.D. in Biophysical Sciences. He struggled with stuttering in his youth and during most of his career, and he worked on understanding and dealing with the problem, ultimately reaching a level of fluency that is viewed as completely "normal". He is not a SLP (Speech Language Pathologist), and does not claim to be one, but most SLP's do not specialize in Stuttering Therapy and there are aspects of stuttering that are addressed more by "Coaching" than "Therapy". These are the aspects he covers and which are complementary to Stuttering Therapy. He has been a member of the National Stuttering Association (NSA), has given talks at their conferences and has been chapter leader in one of their self-help groups in San Francisco. He received year-long training at the Interchange Counseling Institute in San Francisco, and his coaching modality for stutterers has been based on the content of this course.