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Acoustic Vowel Space in Children and Adults with Stuttering

Prajwal Kumar E

The aim of the study was to investigate the acoustic vowel space area in fluent segments of speech of children and adults with stuttering. An attempt was also made to explore the influence of intervention and phonetic context on the vowel space area. A total of 31 native Kannada speaking participants were included in the study. The group with stuttering included 7 untreated adults, 7 treated adults and 5 treated children. The typical group comprised of 5 children and 7 adults. The stimuli consisted of nine non-words in CVCV combinations which were attached with a carrier phrase. Non-word CVCV combination consisted of three corner vowels (/a/, /i/, /u/) in three phonetic contexts (/p/, /t/, /k/). F1 and F2 were measured using PRAAT software and the values were plotted in the MATLAB software to calculate vowel space area. The results revealed a significant difference between untreated and typical adults and between treated and untreated adults. It can be concluded that persons with stuttering exhibited restricted articulatory movements since there was a reduction in vowel space, which was not seen post treatment.