Destigmatizing disfluency

Background: Typically understood as a symptom of a speech disorder, stuttering is the verbal repetition of sounds, words, or phrases that suspend the progression of a speaker’s turn. Method: Using conversation analysis, over 180 phrasal multisyllabic stutters were found in audio recordings of peer telephone support in the United States. Results: Most phrasal stutters arise from early, within-turn indicators of potential sequential, semantic, or syntactic trouble. Typically produced with quick pacing, the stutters are varied, including the latching of sounds across words, abbreviated words, word blends, and/or unintelligible sounds. Elongated or cut-off sounds often indicate the seeming end of a stutter, with either abandonment or a typically fluent completion of a current turn occurring upon a stutter’s conclusion. Importantly, the other interactant never interrupts or completes the stutter. Discussion/conclusion: These findings contradict prior conversation analytic studies of stutters and describe stuttering as a normalized everyday action, where speakers can successfully navigate disfluency to reach eventual fluency.