Developmental Disfluency and Emerging Grammar II

Abstract

From a corpus of over 47,000 spontaneous utterances from four nonstuttering preschool children who were beginning to use syntax, 4,881 multiword, disfluent utterances were identified. Semantic-syntactic structures were identified among the disfluent multiword utterances and differences in frequeney of structures were examined. There was variability in the developmental disfluency of the individual children, but each child's pattern of disfluency was systematic across time. Developmental disflueney shifted across structures systematically for each child and appeared to reflect a "practice effect" for those children beginning to learn syntax. The co-occurrence of disfluency with specific syntactic structures supported the premise that developmental disfluency was more strongly attached to the syntax of utterances than to the production of particular words.

Linguistic Aspects of Stuttering

“…Typical disfluencies, such as revisions, filled pauses, silent pauses, and phrase revisions, are seen in monolingual children during times of rapid language learning (Colburn & Mysak, 1982a, 1982b; Wexler, 1982; Yairi, 1981) and are correlated with language development and language growth in monolingual children (Rispoli et al, 2008; Tumanova et al, 2014). In bilingual children, it can be challenging to discern whether their disfluencies are due to language formulation or due to frank stuttering.…”