Aligning Stuttered-Speech Research with End-User Needs: Scoping Review, Survey, and Guidelines

2026-04-22

AI Summary

This study addresses the misalignment between current stuttered speech research and the real-world needs of end users, which has led to poor performance of speech recognition systems in authentic settings and a lack of user-centered evaluation metrics. Through a scoping review and mixed-methods analysis—including surveys and qualitative content analysis involving 70 stakeholders (adults who stutter and speech-language pathologists)—this work systematically integrates academic inquiry with user perspectives to develop a comprehensive taxonomy for stuttered speech research. The findings uncover critical gaps in the existing literature and propose an actionable, community-informed research agenda designed to steer the field toward more realistic, inclusive, and effective paradigms for stuttered speech technology development.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction
• Natural Language Processing: Speech

Application Category

• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Practical large-scale studies of user experience
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization

Abstract

Atypical speech is receiving greater attention in speech technology research, but much of this work unfolds with limited interdisciplinary dialogue. For stuttered speech in particular, it is widely recognised that current speech recognition systems fall short in practice, and current evaluation methods and research priorities are not systematically grounded in end-user experiences and needs. In this work, we analyse these gaps through 1) a scoping review of papers that deal with stuttered speech and 2) a survey of 70 stakeholders, including adults who stutter and speech-language pathologists. By analysing these two perspectives, we propose a taxonomy of stuttered-speech research, identify where current research directions diverge from the needs articulated by stakeholders, and conclude by outlining concrete guidelines and directions towards addressing the real needs of the stuttering community.

Problem

• stuttered speech
• speech recognition
• end-user needs
• research-practice gap
• atypical speech

Innovation

• stuttered speech
• end-user needs
• scoping review
• speech technology
• interdisciplinary alignment