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Purpose: Stuttering-like disfluencies (SLDs) and typical disfluencies (TDs) are both more likely to occur as utterance length increases. However, longer and shorter utterances differ by more than the number of morphemes: They may also serve different communicative functions or describe different ideas. Decontextualized language, or language that describes events and concepts outside of the “here and now,” is associated with longer utterances. Prior work has shown that language samples taken in decontextualized contexts contain more disfluencies, but averaging across an entire language sample creates a confound between utterance length and decontextualization as contributors to stuttering. We coded individual utterances from naturalistic play samples to test the hypothesis that decontextualized language leads to increased disfluencies above and beyond the effects of utterance length. Method: We used archival transcripts of language samples from 15 preschool children who stutter (CWS) and 15 age- and sex-matched children who do not stutter (CWNS). Utterances were coded as either contextualized or decontextualized, and we used mixed-effects logistic regression to investigate the impact of utterance length and decontextualization on SLDs and TDs. Results: CWS were more likely to stutter when producing decontextualized utterances, even when controlling for utterance length. An interaction between decontextualization and utterance length indicated that the effect of decontextualization was greatest for shorter utterances. TDs increased in decontextualized utterances when controlling for utterance length for both CWS and CWNS. The effect of decontextualization on TDs did not differ statistically between the two groups. Conclusions: The increased working memory demands associated with decontextualized language contribute to increased language planning effort. This leads to increased TD in CWS and CWNS. Under a multifactorial dynamic model of stuttering, the increased language demands may also contribute to increased stuttering in CWS due to instabilities in their speech motor systems.
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Psychophysiological Arousal in Young Children Who Stutter: An Interpretable AI Approach
The presented first-of-its-kind study effectively identifies and visualizes the second-by-second pattern differences in the physiological arousal of preschool-age children who do stutter (CWS) and who do not stutter (CWNS) while speaking perceptually fluently in two challenging conditions: speaking in stressful situations and narration. The first condition may affect children's speech due to high arousal; the latter introduces linguistic, cognitive, and communicative demands on speakers. We collected physiological parameters data from 70 children in the two target conditions. First, we adopt a novel modality-wise multiple-instance-learning (MI-MIL) approach to classify CWS vs. CWNS in different conditions effectively. The evaluation of this classifier addresses four critical research questions that align with state-of-the-art speech science studies' interests. Later, we leverage SHAP classifier interpretations to visualize the salient, fine-grain, and temporal physiological parameters unique to CWS at the population/group-level and personalized-level. While group-level identification of distinct patterns would enhance our understanding of stuttering etiology and development, the personalized-level identification would enable remote, continuous, and real-time assessment of stuttering children's physiological arousal, which may lead to personalized, just-in-time interventions, resulting in an improvement in speech fluency. The presented MI-MIL approach is novel, generalizable to different domains, and real-time executable. Finally, comprehensive evaluations are done on multiple datasets, presented framework, and several baselines that identified notable insights on CWSs' physiological arousal during speech production.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2124285
- PAR ID:
- 10606587
- Publisher / Repository:
- Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies
- Volume:
- 6
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 2474-9567
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 1-32
- Size(s):
- p. 1-32
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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