This study describes relationships between speech, language, and related behaviors exhibited during an initial diagnostic evaluation by 2- to 6-year-old children referred for evaluation of their speech and language development. These children were referred as a result of their parents’ concerns that they might be at risk for stuttering. Subjects were 100 children (85 boys and 15 girls; mean age=54.7 months; SD =12.2 months) who appeared to be representative of the children that clinicians are likely to evaluate in a clinical setting. Analyses were based on a retrospective examination of detailed diagnostic records prepared during the diagnostic evaluations. Results indicated that children recommended for treatment exhibited significantly higher scores than children recommended for reevaluation or for neither treatment nor reevaluation on all measures of speech fluency except the duration of disfluencies (which approached, but did not reach, significance). Importantly, analyses also revealed significant behavioral overlaps between children in the three recommendation subgroups, suggesting that absolute referral criteria probably should not be used when making treatment recommendations. In addition, diagnostic testing revealed that a proportion of these children exhibited concomitant difficulties with language, phonology, or oral motor skills, suggesting that stuttering is not necessarily independent of other aspects of children’s speech and language development. Based on the distribution of children’s scores on a variety of measures in this relatively large database, benchmarks are presented that may provide clinicians with a means for comparing their own treatment recommendations to those made by others.

Selected characteristics of disfluent conversational utterances with and without disfluency clusters were examined in 14 children who stutter (CWS) and 14 children who do not stutter (CWNS). For CWS, utterances with disfluency clusters contained significantly more syllables and clausal constituents than disfluent utterances without clusters, which, in turn, contained significantly more syllables, clauses, and clausal constituents than fluent utterances. For both groups of children, disfluency clusters coincided significantly more often with utterance or clause onset than they did with grammatical constituents located elsewhere within an utterance. CWNS produced a significantly greater percentage of disfluency clusters that contained grammatical revision than did CWS. No significant between-group differences were observed in terms of the number of syllables, clauses, or clausal constituents within cluster-inclusive utterances. Findings are taken to suggest that disfluency clusters are typically produced within the most complex linguistic contexts and that they reflect the effects of producing multiple syntactic constituents within an utterance.

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The purpose of this study was to account for the frequency, type, and possible origins of speech disfluency clusters in the spontaneous speech of 3- to 6-year-old children, 30 who stutter and 30 who do not stutter. On the basis of the Covert Repair Hypothesis (Postma & Kolk, 1993), which suggests that stutterings are the by-products of self-repairs or self-corrections of speech errors, three hypotheses were tested in attempts to account for the frequency and location of stutterings within speech disfluency clusters. Sequences of various types of speech disfluencies in utterances containing disfluency clusters were collected from audio/videotaped conversations between each of these 60 children and their mothers. Three types of speech disfluencies—overt self-repairs, coVert self-repairs, and within-word disfluencies (“stutterings”)—and the disfluency clusters they comprised, were identified and analyzed frame-by-frame. Results indicated that children who stutter produced significantly more stuttering-stuttering clusters (e.g., “/-/-/ w-w-want… ” or “ w-w-waaaant ”) and that, although children who do not stutter occasionally produced stutterings, they never produced stuttering-stuttering clusters. Furthermore, children who stutter produced significantly more stuttering-repair clusters, whereas children who do not stutter produced significantly more repair-repair clusters. Within the disfluency clusters of children who do not stutter, stutterings were more likely to follow an overt self-repair produced at a relatively fast speaking rate (6.6 sylls/sec). Findings are taken to suggest that stuttering-stuttering clusters may help differentiate between children who do and do not stutter, and that speech errors, self-repairs, and speech disfluencies influence one another within and between adjacent sounds, syllables, and Words in what appears to be a nonhappenstance and theoretically important fashion.

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