Research on Communication Attitude and Stuttering in Adults: A Critical Analysis

A review of the communication disorder literature reporting empirical results on the relationship between communication attitude and stuttering was conducted. Findings were organized around three primary issues recurring in the stuttering literature. The reviewed results indicate: (1) stutterers' communication attitudes are significantly poorer than those of nonstutterers; (2) pre-therapy concurrent correlations between communication attitude and stuttering severity are all positive and range widely from negligible to moderate; (3) severity lagged correlations between communication attitude and post-therapy stuttering are all positive, moderately strong, and consistently larger than concurrent correlations. While review findings support maintaining communication attitude as part of the stuttering construct, they are not responsive to the issue of causal connections between pre-therapy attitude and therapy outcome.