Childhood stuttering and speech disfluencies in relation to children’s mean length of utterance: a preliminary study
Section snippets
Participants
Participants were two groups of six children (N=12) between the ages of 3;1 and 5;11 (years;months) who do (CWS) and do not stutter (CWNS) stutter. Each CWS was matched in age (±5 months) to a CWNS participant and all participants were boys, with one exception (CWNS participant 4 was a girl). All participants were native speakers of American English with no history of hearing, neurological, psychological, or intellectual problems per parent report and examiner observation. All participants were
Descriptive/demographic data
Table 4 provides descriptive data for both talker groups, that is, children who stutter (N=6) and children who do not stutter (N=6). As would be expected based on talker group classification criteria, CWS participants exhibited an appreciably higher percentage of SLDs (M=12.0%; SD=2.17) than the CWNS (M=0.43%; SD=0.29). Conversely, CWNS produced an appreciably greater percentage of nonSLDs (M=4.9%; SD=0.59) than the CWS (M=1.0%; SD=0.65). Thus, because CWS produced so few nonSLDs, assessment of
Discussion
Overall, findings from this and most previous studies indicate that increases in either utterance length or complexity or both are associated with increases in stuttering and speech disfluencies for both CWS and CWNS, respectively. While most studies have found that utterance length and complexity interact in their influence on speech disfluencies, some studies have found that complexity has more impact on disfluency than length (Brundage & Bernstein-Ratner, 1989, Logan & Conture, 1995) whereas
Conclusions
Present findings indicate that utterances above children’s MLU are more apt to contain instances of stuttering or speech disfluency which suggests that the presence of stuttering/speech disfluency within an utterance is not independent of the child’s MLU. One might predict, therefore, that communicative situations that (in)directly encourage children to produce utterances above their MLU would be situations that are most apt to be disfluent, while situations that (in)directly encourage children
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Ralph N. Ohde and Stephen M. Camarata for their thoughtful suggestions regarding both the development of this project and revision of this manuscript. In addition, the authors would like to thank Julie Anderson and Mark Pellowski for their assistance in data collection. Finally, the authors would like to thank the participants and their families for their significant contribution to this study. Research supported by NIH grant (DC00523) to Vanderbilt University.
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