Investigation of the awareness and perceptions of stuttering and the resulting effect on social preference in children who do and do not stutter

The purpose of this study was to examine the awareness, perception and social preference of stuttering in children who do and do not stutter. Ten children who stutter and eleven children who do not stutter participated in this study. Each participant viewed a short DVD clip of two puppets taking turns talking. One puppet produced stuttering-like disfluencies, and the other produced typically fluent speech. The participants were then asked a series of questions formulated to examine awareness, perception, and social preference. Results indicated no significant differences between the children who stutter versus the children who do not stutter on any of the three factors examined. However, within the group of children who stutter, significant differences were discovered for two of the seven questions (“which puppet talks like you?” and “what do you call this type of talking?”) when time since onset of stuttering was considered, suggesting that the longer the child has been stuttering, the greater the awareness the child has of his/her disfluent speech both in terms of the behavior and the specific terminology used to describe the behavior.