Abstract

This study was conducted with two purposes. First, to examine the extent to which fluency measures are affected by conditions of speech production. The speech of an unselected sample of 18 aphasic subjects was collected in two situations: conversation and description of short picture stories. Words were uttered at a reduced rate in the story descriptions, which were also characterized by a greater use of verbs. However, the ranking of the subjects on the different measures of fluency was correlated in the two situations. The second aim was to analyze the relationship between different fluency measures: mean silence duration, speech tempo, subjective evaluation of fluency, and the use of grammatical morphemes. Rankings of the subjects on these measures were compared. The different indicators of fluency were positively correlated with each other. Moreover, clinical evaluations of fluency by Belgian and American clinicians were correlated with the objective measures. However, fluency measures did not correlate with the percentage of content words. Thus, reduction of fluency did not seem to be related to a selective loss of function words.