Stuttering Severity Instrument – 4
The SSI-4 is a formal stuttering evaluation that can be requested by loan from
Carolyn.Belle@spps.org through school mail. One drawback of the scale for our
purposes is that it requires a syllable tally rather than a word tally (i.e., percentage of
syllables stuttered, rather than words stuttered). That requires a double analysis of speech
samples, as the state of MN requires notation of the percentage of WORDS stuttered, the
SSI-4, the percentage of SYLLABLES stuttered. The second drawback of the SSI-4 for
our purposes is that data from a small, limited group are available to compare results
with. Given consideration of that, for some populations, a severity rating can be very
cautiously derived based on frequency of stuttering, duration of the longest 3 stuttering
events, secondary behaviors associated with the stuttering. (However, the severity rating
takes into account ONLY the evident, motor behaviors, and should be clearly named as
severity of MOTOR aspects of stuttering for that reason.)