The effect of gap duration on the perception of fluent versus disfluent speech.
Haley J Warner, D H Whalen, Daphna Harel and 1 others
PMID 35032922WHAT IT FOUND
Listeners judged speech disfluent when gaps between words reached 126.46 ms.
Speech-language pathologists required longer gaps to label speech disfluent than people who stutter did. This suggests clinical training may make SLPs less sensitive to subtle pauses than patients themselves.
Key findings
01The threshold at which 50% of utterances were judged disfluent was a gap duration of 126.46 ms.
02Speech-language pathologists consistently required longer gap durations to judge speech as disfluent compared to adults who stutter.
03Generalist SLPs were less inclined than naïve listeners or adults who stutter to identify disfluencies in speech.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study used only four specific tokens of a single short phrase, so results may not generalize to natural, spontaneous speech. The gap duration threshold is specific to the range of gaps tested in this experiment. The participants who were speech-language pathologists did not specialize in fluency disorders, so findings may not apply to stuttering experts. Speech rate was held relatively constant, so the effect of faster or slower rates on perception was not tested.
Declared interests
The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health (Extramural). No other conflicts of interest are reported in the provided text.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that a gap shorter than 126.46 ms is always perceived as fluent. The authors note that judgments operate on a continuum and that context, such as speech rate and prosody, significantly influences perception. This threshold applies specifically to the short, isolated utterances tested here.