Exploring feasibility and effectiveness of occasional whispering in adults who stutter: subjective and objective evaluations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose: Stuttering is a challenging condition characterized by disfluencies which prior work has found to be momentarily improved during whispering. The present study explores the clinical potential of whispering by asking whether the benefits of whispering remain stable with short-term use, extend to conversation tasks, and feasible in daily life.Method: Sixteen adult persons who stutter completed tests assessing the amount of stuttering for normal voiced speech and whispering during both conversation and reading aloud tasks. Participants then used whispered communication in their daily lives and reported their subjective experiences. After three weeks, effectiveness tests were repeated.Results: Stuttering severity was significantly less for whispered speech (vs. typical speech) during a conversation task (50% reduction) although this effect is smaller than for a reading task (85% reduction). This reduction remained present and comparable in magnitude after three weeks of approximately 5 to 10 minutes daily whispering. Participants subjectively indicated positive experiences with respect to the effects of whispering on fluency and reported whispering helped reduce stuttering-related anxiety. However, four participants (25%) reported negative voice side-effects (e.g., hoarseness, vocal-fold strain), associated with regular whispering.Conclusions: Occasional use of whispering can effectively reduce stuttering and related behaviors during both reading and conversational speech. This result paves the way for future technological applications that convert whispered speech into natural sounding speech in real-time.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".