The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of utterance length and meaningfulness on the speech initiation times of stuttering and nonstuttering children. Subjects were 36 elementary school students: 18 stutterers and 18 nonstutterers matched by age, grade, and gender. Each child produced 23 each of a short meaningful, long meaningful, and long nonsense utterance in response to a visual cue. Results are consistent with other studies that found stutterers to be slower than nonstutterers when responding verbally to an external cue. It is also apparent that nonstuttering, stuttering-only, and stuttering-plus children are affected differently by utterance length and meaningfulness. This indicates that the three groups may process speech motor events for verbal responses differently.
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