Background: Clinicians rely on parents to provide information regarding the onset and development of stuttering in their own children. The accuracy and reliability of their judgments of stuttering is therefore important and is not well researched.
Aim: To investigate the accuracy of parent judgements of stuttering in their own children's speech when compared with judgements made by the parents of normally fluent children and experienced clinicians.
Methods & procedures: Twenty parents of children who stutter made judgements of stuttering during repeated presentations of 3-min audio-visual samples of their children. Twenty control parents of children (age and gender matched) who do not stutter also assessed the children who stutter speech samples.
Outcomes & results: The parents of both the children who stutter and those who do not stutter displayed high levels of judgement accuracy (parents, of children who stutter percentage agreement mean (standard deviation) = 90.9 (6.02); parents of children who do not stutter = 86.4 (9.7)) and consistency (90.3-90.6%) in judging stuttering in young children. But the parents of children who stutter showed significantly higher levels of accuracy (t(59) = 4.63, p<0.0001; d = 0.8) in judging stuttered intervals than the children who do not stutter parents.
Conclusions & implications: Parents of children who stutter may be both accurate and reliable in identifying brief intervals of speech containing stuttering and non-stuttering in their own children.