UKEveryone produces disfluencies when they speak spontaneously. However, whereas
most disfluencies pass unnoticed, the repetitions, blocks and prolongations produced
by stutterers can have a severely disruptive effect on communication. The causes of
stuttering have proven hard to pin down - researchers differ widely in their views on
the cognitive mechanisms that underlie it. The present chapter presents initial research
which supports a view (Vasic and Wijnen, this volume) that places the emphasis
firmly on the self-monitoring system, suggesting that stuttering may be a consequence
of over-sensitivity to the types of minor speech error that we all make.
Our study also allows us to ask whether the speech of people who stutter is perceived
as qualitatively different from that of nonstutterers, when it is fluent and when it
contains similar types of minor disfluencies. Our results suggest that for closely
matched, naturally occurring segments of speech, listeners rate the speech of stutterers
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