FluencyBank English Voices-AWS Corpus

	Nan Bernstein Ratner Speech and Hearing Sciences University of Maryland nratner@umd.edu
	Courtney Luckman Speech and Hearing Sciences New York University courtney.luckman@gmail.com

Browsable transcripts

Downloadable transcripts and OASES sheets

Link to media folder

Citation information

Bernstein-Ratner, N., & MacWhinney, B. (2018). Fluency Bank: A new resource for fluency research and practice. Journal of Fluency Disorders, 56, 69-80. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfludis.2018.03.002 PMC 5986295

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

These video clips that you can view and download from the three links given above have been contributed by members of the National Stuttering Association (https://westutter.org) to assist students in learning more about the behaviors and affective/cognitive features of living with stuttering as an adult. The filenames begin with the participants age, then a letter for male or female gender and finally a letter to distinguish participants with the same age and gender.

Most adults have two speech samples and a completed (but not scored) OASES form. We thank the publishers of the Stuttering Severity Instrument-4 (SSI-4; www.ProedInc.com) for permission to use the Friuli passage. 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.

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

Instructions

1. Please talk about the impact of stuttering on your daily life: You can talk about your interactions with family and friends, school and/or work, and your participation in community activities.
2. What do you think causes stuttering?
3. If you have received treatment for your stuttering, tell me about your therapy experiences and the outcomes of these therapies.
4. Please describe what successful communication means to you; can you give an example of a positive communicative experience?
5. If you didn't stutter, what might be different in your life?
6. What else would you want to say to students (or the general public) to help them learn about stuttering or ways to support people who stutter?

Some participants did not answer all questions, or combined responses to questions in a single set of comments. Starting in June, 2017 new contributions from adults who stutter also contain a reading of the Friuli reading passage from the SSI4, provided with the consent of the publishers of the Stuttering Severity Instrument -4 . Suggested activities for these transcripts include:

1. Practice with fluency assessment. It is well-known that transcribers disagree substantially when coding the same passage of stuttered speech, in terms of presence/absence of disfluency, location as well as type of fluency behaviors. Instructors may want to assign the same participant to be coded by multiple students (or an entire class of students). Discuss how listeners may agree or disagree on the behavioral features of stuttering, as well as behaviors that appear to be stutter-like or more typical disfluency.
2. Practice with scoring of the Stuttering Severity Instrument. (Note: forms are not provided; you may purchase a full set of materials at proedinc.com Pro-Ed. You may choose to contrast patterns of stuttering that are seen when volunteers read, in contrast to their conversational speech.
3. Practice with OASES scoring. For a given participant, consult OASES scoring guidelines which must be purchased from here . How would you characterize the impact of stuttering on this participant? Can you identify impacts that should influence therapy goals? How might you address these impacts?
4. Practice with contrasting behavioral and affective/cognitive aspects of stuttering in adults. Assess the degree to which individuals' behavioral profiles match the impacts of stuttering on their lives. Are the impacts of stuttering clearly linked to the frequency or severity of stuttered events in a person's speech? Discuss.
5. Listen to the answers that participants gave to the 6 questions. Are there similar threads? Are there clear differences in people's opinions? How might responses to these questions shape further mutual goal setting for therapy?
6. Compare profiles of volunteers in the Voices of People who Stutter project and volunteers below, who self-identify as People who Clutter.

These are just some ideas to get instructors and students started. We welcome ideas for other activities. Please contact us at nratner@umd.edu with suggestions and comments.

ARE YOU INTERESTED IN DONATING SAMPLES TO THESE PROJECTS? See this page for more information.

Note: The Voices of Adults/Children who Stutter and Voices of People who Clutter projects are approved by the Institutional Review Board of the University of Maryland (Nan Bernstein Ratner, PI).