Disfluencies in normal three-year-old and five-year-old male children

Abstract

Just as a speech-language pathologist uses knowledge of normal language development to make a diagnosis of language delay, normative data on fluency development can be used to make a differential diagnosis of normal disfluency from fluency disorders. Data at each discrete age level on normal disf luency is an important aspect in understanding the development of fluency.The purpose of this study was to compare the frequency of specific disf luencies in 3 year old and 5 year old normal 2 male children in terms of part-word repetitions, word repetitions, phrase repetitions, interjections, revisionincomplete phrases, disrhythmic phonations and tense pauses.The disfluencies were observed while each child spontaneously interacted with an investigator in a clinical room. Two questions were addressed:1. Do three-year-old male children exhibit a higher overall frequency of disfluencies than five-yearold male children? 2. Do three-year-old male children exhibit a greater frequency of certain disf luencies than five-yearold male children? Twenty normal preschool male children comprised the subjects of this study. All children were randomly selected from the greater Portland area and passed the selection criteria. The children were of two groups:10 three-yearold male children (x=36 months) and 10 five-year-old children (x=60 months). After spontaneous speech samples were obtained and recorded from each subject, the investigator transcribed the text verbatim and categorized seven types of disfluencies. The Mann-Whitney U Test (Siegel, 1956) was used to analyze the data. The results indicated that a statistically significant difference on the total disfluency did not exist between the two age groups.Results indicated that at the 0.05 level of confidence, a statistical significance did exist for interjections. Male children in the five-year-old age group evidenced a higher number of interjections than the three-year-old children.No other statistically significant differences were found.The results yielded the following conclusions: 3 1. The three-year-old children did not exhibit a higher overall frequency of disfluencies than the five-year-old children. Although no statistical difference was found, the data indicated that the five-year-old children exhibited a higher overall frequency than the three-year-old children.2. There was no statistically significant difference in the frequency of occurrence of part-word repetitions, word repetitions, and phrase repetitions exhibited by the two age groups of normal male children.3. There was no statistically significant difference in the frequency of occurrence of revisionincomplete phrases, tense pauses, and disrhythmic phonations.

A longitudinal study of the disfluencies of four and six year old children

“…All the were more repetitions were produced at a greater frequency in the younger children than the older ones. In addition, the Christiansen (1987) study supported the results of the DeJoy and Gregory (1985) investigation in that revision-incomplete phrases occurred with the greatest frequency in the speech of 3 year olds.…”

“…Nonf luency: Interruption in the forward flow of speech; synonymous with disfluency (Christiansen 1987). …”

“…Normal disfluency: Disfluent speech behavior exhibited by most speakers not requiring intervention or concern (Christiansen 1987 (Emerick and Hatten 1979).…”

“…Examples: "t-toy"; "ma-ma-man" (Christiansen 1987) Phrase repetition: Unintentional repetition of two or more words without changing the content. An example of two units of phrase repetition would be, "See the, see the, see the car" (Johnson et al 1959).…”

A longitudinal study of disfluencies in the speech of normal preschool children

“…That Arnold-Cockburn (1987) investigated only three disfluency types and other studies (DeJoy and Gregory, 1985;Paguia-Christianson, 1987;Wexler and Mysak, 1982;Yairi, 1981Yairi, , 1982 In the current study, disrhythmic phonations was ranked fifth out of nine disfluencies, up from its ranking of seventh the previous year. The frequency however, at .31 in the present study and .09 in 1987, was not sufficient to cause alarm (Pindzola and White, 1986).…”