FluencyBank English Voices-CWS-Protect Corpus


Nan Bernstein Ratner
Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences
University of Maryland

Courtney Luckman
Speech and Hearing Sciences
New York University

Participants: 22
Type of Study: naturalistic
Location: USA
Media type: video

Browsable transcripts

Downloadable transcripts

Link to media folder

Citation information

In accordance with TalkBank rules, any use of data from this corpus must be accompanied by at least one of the above references.

Project Description

This is the fluency annotated version of the Voices-CWS corpus.

The transcripts and video clips that you can view and download from the three links given above were gathered by Nan Bernstein Ratner to assist students in learning more about the behaviors and affective/cognitive features of living with stuttering as a child. We want to gratefully acknowledge the support and assistance of Lee Caggiano and Friends (https://www.friendswhostutter.org/), and of the National Stuttering Association (https://westutter.org/). Both of these organizations approved our recruitment of volunteers at their national annual meetings.

Each child participant completed an interview (int) and a reading task (rdg). The reading task involved grade-appropriate readings from the Stuttering Severity Instrument-4 (SSI-4), thanks to permissions granted by the publisher (www.proedinc.com). Beginning in 2021, children/teens were also asked to fill out copies of the OASES-C/OASES-T, depending upon age. These forms were completed but not scored to enable student practice. OASES forms are made available thanks to a donation from Stuttering Therapy Resources, Inc. (www.StutteringTherapyResources.com). Forms should not be used except in conjunction with teaching activities and the FluencyBank Voices project. New forms and scoring instructions are available at StutteringTherapyResources.com. Researchers who use these materials are asked to cite: Yaruss, J.S., & Quesal. R.W. (2016). Overall Assessment of the Speaker’s Experience of Stuttering (OASES). Stuttering Therapy Resources.

OASES is described in this article: Yaruss, J. S., & Quesal, R. W. (2006). Overall Assessment of the Speaker's Experience of Stuttering (OASES): Documenting multiple outcomes in stuttering treatment. Journal of Fluency Disorders, 31(2), 90-115. doi:10.1016/j.jfludis.2006.02.002

During the interview, the children were asked the following questions:

  1. Tell me about some of the things you've been doing at the friends meeting so far.
  2. Do you know why your family decided to come here?
  3. Have you met any kids here?
  4. Can you tell me about your talking?
  5. What have you learned about stuttering?
  6. Have you had speech therapy? Is there anything you'd like to say to people who want to become speech therapists? What could they do that would help you the most?