The purpose of this study was to assess the nonword repetition skills of 24 children who do (CWS; n = 12) and do not stutter (CWNS; n = 12) between the ages of 3;0 and 5;2. Findings revealed that CWS produced significantly fewer correct two-and three-syllable nonword repetitions and made significantly more phoneme errors on three-syllable nonwords relative to CWNS. In addition, there was a significant relationship between performance on a test of expressive phonology and nonword repetition for CWS, but not CWNS. Findings further revealed no significant fluctuation in fluency as nonwords increased in length. Taken together, findings lend support to previous work, suggesting that nonword repetition skills differ for CWS compared with CWNS, and that these findings cannot be attributed to (a) weak language performance on the part of CWS, or (b) the occurrence of stuttering in the course of nonword production.Educational objectives: After reading this article, the learner will be able to: (a) describe one common means of assessing phonological working memory in children; (b) summarize the performance differences of children who stutter compared to peers on a nonword repetition task; (c) compare the results of the present study with previous work in this area. KeywordsStuttering; Phonological; Nonword repetition; Children Nonword repetition in young children who do and do not stutterAs a group, children who stutter (CWS) tend to differ from their peers in a range of areas, including language (e.g., see Hall, 2004;Weiss, 2004, for recent reviews). Perhaps because differences in the language performance of CWS tend to be subclinical (i.e., not constituting a language disorder), the literature has not focused on the many language-related areas that have been associated with language performance in other populations. In particular, one language-related area that has received considerable attention is the role of phonological working memory in the language performance of children with specific language impairment (SLI; e.g., Baddeley & Wilson, 1993;Botting & Conti-Ramsden, 2001;Conti-Ramsden, 2003;Ellis Weismer et al., 2000;Gathercole & Baddeley, 1990;Gray, 2003;Marton & Schwartz, 2003;Montgomery, 1995a;Munson, Kurtz, & Windsor, 2005). As a group, these * Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Julie D. Anderson, who is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, Indiana University, 200 Jordan Avenue South, Bloomington, Indiana 47405-7002. Electronic mail may be sent to judander@indiana.edu. NIH Public AccessAuthor Manuscript J Fluency Disord. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2008 July 7. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript studies generally reveal that nonword repetition represents an area of weakness for children with SLI.For example, Montgomery (1995b) examined working memory and sentence comprehension in school-age children with SLI and language-matched peers with typically developing language using nonword repetition a...
This paper reports on the results of a large multicenter project designed to develop an empirically based classification of preschool children with language impairments. A clinically selected population of 252 children with specific language impairments (SLI) was used to evaluate the reliability, coverage, and usefulness of both standard clinical and research definitions of such children. Varying degrees of congruence were found between the clinically identified children with SLI and those identified as SLI using discrepancy, deficit, and standardized operational criteria. Such mismatch between the original clinical identification and more standardized operational criteria may be related to different clinical perspectives, professional training, and limited assessment measures. These results suggest that there is a significant gulf between the clinical diagnosis of children with specific language impairment and more standardized operational criteria. It is suggested that the global concept of a “specific language impairment” may not be a useful concept for either clinical or research activities.
The present investigation addresses two primary hypotheses: (a) that a subset of children with developmental language disorders exhibits significantly more disfluencies than other children with language disorders and (b) that differences between the disfluent and nondisfluent groups observed in fluency may be related to differences in language deficits. Spontaneous language samples from 60 preschool children with developmental language disorders were analyzed for frequency and type of disfluencies. Comparisons of the frequency of disfluencies across subjects revealed that a subset of 10 subjects exhibited significantly more disfluencies than the other subjects with language disorders. Demographic, intelligence, and language variables were compared across the two groups to determine whether such factors could account for the differences in fluency. The subjects with greater percentages of disfluencies were found to be significantly older and demonstrated significantly higher scores on two standard measures of vocabulary. These findings were interpreted in light of two models of disfluencies: the neuropsycholinguistic (Perkins, Kent, & Curlee, 1991) and Demands and Capacities (Adams, 1990; Starkweather, 1987). This suggests that some children with language disorders are at risk for fluency breakdown because of dysynchronies in the development of lexical and syntactic aspects of language or as a result of mismatches between speaking demands and capacities.
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