Disfluencies in the Conversations of Young Children Who Stutter

Abstract

Parents of children who stutter are often advised to reduce the number of questions they ask their children. Implicit in this advice is the assumption that children who stutter will be more disfluent when answering questions. This study assessed parent-child conversational speech for 8 parent-child pairs to determine the relative amounts of disfluency in the child’s responses to questions versus making assertions. Length and complexity of the children’s utterances and the frequency of the parents’ requests by level of demand were also evaluated. Results suggested that the responses made by the children to their parents’ requests were significantly less likely to contain disfluencies than were their assertions. Also, longer and more complex utterances were more likely to contain disfluencies, regardless of their designation as assertions or responses. Parents were shown to favor request types of lower levels of demand in conversations. Requests posed with greater levels of demand were somewhat more likely to yield disfluent responses than were those at a lower demand level.

Effects of Length, Complexity, and Grammatical Correctness on Stuttering in Spanish-Speaking Preschool Children

“…Given that this is the only published study, to the authors' knowledge, that has examined the influence of these specific linguistic variables on the speech fluency of monolingual Spanish-speaking children who stutter, comparisons were limited to studies that have been completed with monolingual English-speaking children who stuttered. Findings were consistent with many earlier reports of English-speaking children (e.g., Gaines et al, 1991;Logan & Conture, 1995, 1997Bernstein Ratner & Sih, 1987;Weiss & Zebrowski, 1992;Yaruss, 1999;Zackheim & Conture, 2003) and revealed that stuttered utterances in Spanish contained more syllables and clauses per utterance than fluent utterances. In addition, the stuttered utterances were more likely to contain grammatical errors and to contain either a subordinate or a conjoined clause.…”

“…Results of these investigations suggest that for young English speakers, increased syntactic complexity and, in some cases, utterance length are associated with increased stuttering (e.g., Bernstein Ratner & Sih, 1987;Brundage & Bernstein Ratner, 1989;Gaines, Runyan, & Meyers, 1991;Kadi-Hanifi & Howell, 1992;Logan, 2003;Logan & Conture, 1995;Sawyer, Chon, & Ambrose, 2008;Weiss & Zebrowski, 1992;Yaruss, 1999;Yaruss, Newman, & Flora, 1999). Further, there is evidence in English that a mismatch between a child's overall linguistic proficiency and increased linguistic complexity may compromise fluency in preschool children who stutter as well as those who do not stutter (e.g., Bauerly & Gottwald, 2009;Zackheim & Conture, 2003).…”

Influences of rate, length, and complexity on speech disfluency in a single-speech sample in preschool children who stutter

“…Of course, a longer MLU in Section B does not imply a direct causal relationship to SLD, but it does point to influences beyond sample length as a factor in these children's disfluencies. In addition, it adds to the body of research implicating utterance length as a factor in disfluent speech (Gaines et al, 1991;Logan & Conture, 1995;Weiss & Zebrowski, 1992;Yaruss, 1999). The findings regarding MLU in Sections A and B relative to MLU in the longer speech sample are consistent with those of Zackheim and Conture (2003), who found that children who stuttered produced more SLD on utterances that were above their MLU.…”

Social anxiety and the severity and typography of stuttering in adolescents

“…Craig and Hancock (1996) found that children who stutter were no more anxious (trait anxiety) than children of a similar age who did not stutter. State anxiety, however, was found to be associated with greater risks of stuttering in children (Weiss & Zebrowski, 1992).…”