Phonological complexity in school-aged children who stutter and exhibit a language disorder

Phonetic complexity of words immediately following utterance-initial productions in children who stutter

“…As noted by Bernstein Ratner (2005), increased phonetic complexity alone has not been shown to disrupt speech fluency or delay speech reaction time in non-stuttering individuals. However, there are data from older children and adults who stutter that suggest phonetic complexity may contribute to stuttered speech and/or delayed speech planning relative to fluent peers when examined in the presence or absence of other, non-phonetic factors (e.g., word frequency, neighborhood density, neighborhood frequency; Byrd et al, in press; LaSalle & Wolk, 2011; Wolk & LaSalle, 2015). Further examination of the interaction between each of these factors, while also considering the potential contribution of the upcoming word upon words currently in production, will further validate or invalidate the predictions of the EXPLAN model.…”

“…Moreover, if linguistic factors were included during analyses, examination of phonetic complexity was restricted to the stuttered word rather than the word produced immediately after the stuttered word. Recent investigations of the role of phonetic complexity in older children and adults who stutter suggest linguistic factors such as low neighborhood density, in addition to phonetic complexity, may increase the likelihood of stuttered speech (LaSalle & Wolk, 2011; Wolk & LaSalle, 2015, cf. Coalson et al, 2012).…”

The effect of phonetic complexity on the speed of single-word productions in adults who do and do not stutter

“…Despite the correspondence between phonetic complexity and speech development at younger ages in typically developing children, Dworzynski and Howell (2004) found that increased IPC values do not predict stuttered speech in children under 6 years of age. Instead, IPC values are only associated with moments of stuttered speech for speakers 6 years of age and older (e.g., Howell & Au-Yeung, 2007; Howell et al, 2006; LaSalle & Wolk, 2011; Wolk & LaSalle, 2015). That is, the effects of phonetic complexity on stuttering appear to emerge only after speech production systems have matured based on data from spontaneous speech production.…”

“…For example, Anderson (2007) found that, after controlling for word length and grammatical class, stuttered words extracted from spontaneous speech samples from children ( n = 15; age range 3–5 years) occurred on words with lower frequency and lower neighborhood frequency. Wolk and LaSalle (2015) considered a number of lexical factors during analysis of phonetic complexity and stuttered versus fluent content words by adolescents who stutter ( n = 8, age range: 7–19 years), including word frequency, neighborhood density, and neighborhood frequency. After fluent and stuttered words from spontaneous speech samples were matched for utterance length, syntactic complexity, and utterance-position, stuttered words were more phonetically complex but also phonologically sparser than fluent tokens.…”

Selecting Treatments and Monitoring Outcomes: The Circle of Evidence-Based Practice and Client-Centered Care in Treating a Preschool Child Who Stutters

“…I may also need to think about additional therapy time that will need to be dedicated to treatment of additional concerns. If there are additional therapeutically relevant concerns about language ability, they may interact with the child's ability to be fluent during therapy tasks directed to the stuttering problem (Bernstein Ratner, 2005), as well as conversational attempts having the full range of linguistic and phonological complexity (Watson, Byrd, & Carlo, 2011;Wolk & LaSalle, 2015). If David also requires language intervention, the reverse is likely to be true as well-as we try to help him with more challenging language achievements, the child may find it more difficult to be fluent, as a large body of research suggests (see review by Hall, Wagovich, & Bernstein Ratner, 2007).…”