Articulation rate and its relationship to disfluency type, duration, and temperament in preschool children who stutter

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between articulation rate, frequency and duration of disfluencies of different types, and temperament in preschool children who stutter (CWS). In spontaneous speech samples from 19 children CWS (mean age = 3:9; years: months), we measured articulation rate, the frequency and duration of (a) sound prolongations; (b) soundsyllable repetitions; (c) single syllable whole word repetitions; and (d) clusters. Temperament was assessed with the Children's Behavior Questionnaire (Rothbart et al., 2001). There was a significant negative correlation between articulation rate and average duration of sound prolongations (p<0.01), and between articulation rate and frequency of stuttering-like disfluencies (SLDs) (p<0.05). No other relationships proved statistically significant. Results do not support models of stuttering development that implicate particular characteristics of temperament as proximal contributors to stuttering; however, this is likely due to the fact that current methods, including the ones used in the present study, do not allow for the identification of a functional relationship between temperament and speech production. Findings do indicate that for some CWS, relatively longer sound prolongations co-occur with relatively slower speech rate, which suggests that sound prolongations, across a range of durations, may represent a distinct type of SLD, not just in their obvious perceptual characteristics, but in their potential influence on overall speech production at multiple levels.

Beyond stuttering: Speech disfluencies in normally fluent French-speaking children at age 4

“…Moreover, the speech rate could also impact the speech disfluencies produced. The impact of speech rate on disfluencies is unclear in children who stutter (Chon, Sawyer, & Ambrose, 2012;Sawyer, Chon, & Ambrose, 2008;Tumanova, Zebrowski, Throneburg, Kayikci, 2011). However, a previous study shows that an increase in speech rate is significantly correlated with an increase in speech disfluencies in children and adults who do not stutter (Oliveira, Broglio, Bernardes, & Capellini, 2013).…”

Duration of Stuttered Syllables Measured by “Computerized Scoring of the Stuttering Severity (CSSS)” and “Pratt”

“…Using the keywords stuttering, stutterer(s), stutter, disfluency, disfluencies, duration, durational, Praat, and CSSS-2, through an electronic search on PubMed during June-July 2017, we found 7 articles that investigated the duration of SLDs as part of the study [32][33][34][35][36]. Just 1 out of these 7 articles was performed on adults [36] Print while the rest included children and adolescences as their participants.…”

Slow speech rate effects on stuttering preschoolers with disordered phonology

“…Yaruss and Conture (1995) found no articulation rate difference between preschoolers who do and do not stutter, but they reported data in syllables per second (sps). Also, measuring sps in an investigation of preschoolers who stutter, Tumanova, Zebrowski, Throneburg and Kulak Kayikci (2011) found that the higher the stuttering frequency and the longer the sound prolongation duration, the slower the children's articulation rate. At an acoustic level, the formant transition rates in F2 (Hz/ms) between bilabial consonants and vowels and between alveolar consonants and vowels are not as contrastive or easily identifiable in young children who stutter (Chang, Ohde, & Conture, 2002;Yaruss & Conture, 1993).…”