Anxiety in speakers who persist and recover from stuttering
Section snippets
Participants
Fifty-seven participants took part in the study. Data from three participants were not included because their forms were incomplete. Of the remaining 54 participants, there were 19 fluent speakers in the control group, and 35 participants who stutter (18 persistent and 17 recovered according to the criteria detailed below). Control participants were recruited from schools in central London. An exclusion criterion for control participants was a parental or school report of any language disorder.
Results
The mean and standard deviations of STAIC scores for the four state measures and the one trait measure are given in Table 4. These scores are presented separately for the persistent, recovered and control groups.
The state and trait anxiety scores were analyzed separately. First, the mean state anxiety scores were analyzed by a two-way ANOVA with factors state (four levels) and participant group (persistent, recovered and control). There was a significant effect of participant group (F(2, 51) =
Discussion
The first question given at the end of the method was whether speakers who stutter have higher levels of trait anxiety than controls. Table 5 shows that this was not the case as there were no significant differences in trait characteristics between any of the three participant groups. The lack of a statistical difference is not necessarily support for the view that there is no difference between speaker groups. The lack of trait differences between people who stutter (both persistent and
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank two anonymous reviewers for comments. This work was supported by grant 072639 from the Wellcome Trust to the last author.
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2019, Journal of Fluency DisordersCitation Excerpt :Preschoolers and primary school-age children who stutter do not report higher levels of anxiety than their typically fluent peers (Andrews & Harris, 1964; Craig & Hancock, 1996; van der Merwe, Robb, Lewis, & Ormond, 2011; but see Blood, Blood, Maloney, Meyer, & Qualls, 2007 for contrasting evidence). Although the precise timing of the onset of anxiety among people who stutter has not been identified, elevated levels of anxiety are thought to manifest in early adolescence (Blood, Blood, Tellis, & Gabel, 2001, 2007; Davis, Shisca, & Howell, 2007; Gunn et al., 2014; Mulcahy, Hennessey, Beilby, & Byrnes, 2008) and intensify in adulthood (see Smith et al., 2014 for a review). People who stutter with higher levels of social support report lower levels of anxiety and depressive mood states (Blumgart et al., 2014).