Time-Interval Measurement of Stuttering

The study reported in this paper was designed to replicate and extend the results of an earlier study (Ingham, Cordes, & Gow, 1993) that investigated time-interval judgments of stuttering. Results confirmed earlier findings that interjudge agreement is higher for these interval-recording tasks than has been previously reported for event-based analyses of stuttering judgments or for time-interval analyses of event judgments. Results also confirmed an earlier finding that judges with intrajudge agreement levels of 90% or better show higher interjudge agreement than judges with lower intrajudge agreement scores. This study failed to find differences between audiovisual and audio-only judgment conditions; between relatively experienced and relatively inexperienced student judges; and, most importantly, between the judgments made, and the agreement levels achieved, by judges from two different clinical research settings. The implications of these findings for attempts to develop a reliable measurement method for stuttering are discussed.