Elsevier

Journal of Communication Disorders

Volume 40, Issue 5, September–October 2007, Pages 398-417
Journal of Communication Disorders

Anxiety in speakers who persist and recover from stuttering

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcomdis.2006.10.003Get rights and content

Abstract

Purpose

The study was designed to see whether young children and adolescents who persist in their stutter (N = 18) show differences in trait and/or state anxiety compared with people who recover from their stutter (N = 17) and fluent control speakers (N = 19).

Method

A fluent control group, a group of speakers who have been documented as stuttering in the past but do not stutter now and a group of speakers (also with a documented history of stuttering) who persist in their stuttering participated, all aged 10–17 years. The State–Trait Anxiety Inventory for Children was administered.

Results

There were no differences between persistent, recovered and control groups with regard to trait anxiety. The persistent group had higher state anxiety than controls and the recovered group for three out of four speaking situations.

Conclusion

The findings are interpreted as showing that anxiety levels in certain affective states appear to be associated with the speaking problem.

Learning outcomes

A reader should be able to appreciate the difference between state and trait anxiety understand views about how the role anxiety has on stuttering has changed over time appreciate different views about how anxiety affects speakers who persist and recover from stuttering see why longitudinal work is needed to study these issues.

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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