An Investigation into the Difference in Word Class and the Function of Repetition in Stuttering Persian Speaking Children

Abstract

Various studies have explored developmental stuttering in children. However, not many investigations have been conducted to examine repetition types produced by these children. That said, the purpose of this study was to examine repetition types produced by the children who stutter and those who do not, observing for differences in word classes, including content and function words. To that end, six children who stutter and eight children who do not participated in this study. The participants were Iranian and they were monolingual Persian speakers. The language productions of these children were recorded. A situation has been created for them in which they produced natural data. The results of the study indicated that both groups of children produced more number of partword repetition than whole-word repetition. Moreover, the results indicated that there was a statistically significant difference between the two groups with regard to the repetition types of different word classes. The findings also revealed that children who stutter produced significantly more part-word repetition in both content and function words. This was also observed for the content words produced by the children who do not stutter. However, no significant difference was observed in the repetition types of function words in the production of the children who do not stutter. The study has proposed some arguments for the obtained results.