Effects of Alcohol on the Speech of Alcoholics

Speech disfluency resulting from alcohol intoxication was investigated in an experiment using established measures of nonfluency. Male alcoholic subjects (N = 16) read a standardized passage into an audio recorder, once while sober and at two different degrees of intoxication. For each reading, the frequency of occurrence of 13 different operationally defined speech errors was scored. Subjects, when intoxicated, took a longer time to read the standardized passage; had increased interjections of words, phrases, and sounds; increased word omissions; increased word revisions; and increased broken suffixes at higher levels of intoxication (10 oz). Possible uses for a profile of disfluent speech of alcoholics are considered and suggestions for further investigations are discussed