Study of coarticulation and F2 transitions in French and Italian adult stutterers

This paper analyses coarticulation in Italian and French monolingual stutterers tested in fluent speech. Our aim is to discover whether the stutterers’ fluent speech presents specificities in intra-syllabic coarticulation opposed to the fluent speakers. Two factors will be considered: the role of the syllabic complexity and that of the language. The participants repeat syllables of variable complexity included in a carrier sentence. Besides the great importance of the language, our results show a reduced degree of anticipatory coarticulation (influence of the vowel on the pre-vocalic consonant) in persons who stutter. If the complexity of the syllabic attack increases, the F2 transition of the stutterers’ speech remain stable while the fluents’ one does not. These results show that both French and Italian stutterers cannot adapt their articulatory gestures when the complexity increases.