CoPracTter: Toward Integrating Personalized Practice Scenarios, Timely Feedback and Social Support into An Online Support Tool for Coping with Stuttering in China

TL;DR

This paper presents CoPracTter, an online tool designed specifically for Chinese people who stutter, integrating personalized practice scenarios, real-time feedback, and social support to improve fluency and confidence.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, culturally tailored online support tool for Chinese PwS, combining personalized practice, real-time speech indicators, and community feedback, tested over an extended period.

Findings

Personalized practice scenarios improved fluency.

Timely community feedback helped maintain positivity.

Participants faced real-life challenges more confidently.

Abstract

Stuttering is a speech disorder influencing over 70 million people worldwide, including 13 million in China. It causes low self-esteem among other detrimental effects on people who stutter (PwS). Although prior work has explored approaches to assist PwS, they primarily focused on western contexts. In our formative study, we found unique practices and challenges among Chinese PwS. We then iteratively designed an online tool, CoPracTter, to support Chinese PwS practicing speaking fluency with 1) targeted stress-inducing practice scenarios, 2) real-time speech indicators, and 3) personalized timely feedback from the community. We further conducted a seven-day deployment study (N=11) to understand how participants utilized these key features. To our knowledge, it is the first time such a prototype was designed and tested for a long time with multiple PwS participants online simultaneously. Results indicate that personalized practice with targeted scenarios and timely feedback from a supportive community assisted PwS in speaking fluently, staying positive, and facing similar real-life circumstances.