Phonetic complexity and stuttering in Turkish-speaking children who stutter

Abstract

The relationship between stuttering and phonetic complexity for words spoken by Turkish children who stutter was investigated. The research questions were: (1) Do Turkishspeaking children stutter more on unbound content words than on unbound function words? (2) Do Turkish-speaking children stutter more on words with higher phonetic complexity scores? Twenty-one monolingual children aged 6-11 years who had a clinical diagnosis of stuttering participated. Speech samples were transcribed and lexical categories determined. Phonetic complexity was assessed by an adaptation of Jakielski's (1998) Index of Phonetic Complexity (IPC) for Turkish. Results revealed that the mean