Disfluency Behavior of Elementary-School Stutterers and Nonstutterers: Loci of Instances of Disfluency

Abstract

One hundred fifty-two children from kindergarten and grades one through six, 76 stutterers and 76 nonstutterers, performed a speech task. Each of the kindergarten and first-grade children repeated 10 sentences after the experimenter, and each of the second- through sixth-grade children read a passage. All words judged to have been spoken disfluently were analyzed for the presence of each of Brown’s four word attributes—initial phoneme, grammatical function, sentence position, and word length. Disfluencies were not randomly distributed in the speech of these children. For both stutterers and nonstutterers, disfluencies occurred most frequently on words possessing the same attributes as those reported by Brown to be troublesome for adult stutterers. The findings of this study demonstrate the essential similarity in the loci of instances of disfluency in the speech of (1) children and adults and (2) stutterers and nonstutterers.

Sentence position and syntactic complexity of stuttering in early childhood: A longitudinal study

“…While it may indeed be the case that a word class exchange involves a shifting strategy in dealing with stuttering, this shift appears to take place at a later age than what would be expected if it were to involve linguistic factors. As such, Au-Yeung et al (1998) found evidence that the influence of utterance position on stuttering becomes less marked as children get older, consistent with previous findings (e.g., Williams et al, 1969). Thus, to the extent that disfluency patterns change over language development (Hall, Wagovich, & Bernstein Ratner, 2007; Rispoli & Hadley, 2001; Wijnen, 1990), the development of sentence planning may lead to instances of stuttering becoming more evenly distributed throughout an utterance, resulting in a relatively greater proportion of stuttering on content words.…”

“…This multi-site study was intended to investigate developmental subgroups of early childhood stuttering and to identify predictive factors of persistence or recovery from stuttering. The focus of the present investigation, however, was to examine linguistic factors associated with instances of stuttering during speech, which have been observed to be present in the speech of all children, whether categorized as stuttering or non-stuttering (e.g., Au-Yeung et al, 1998; Silverman, 1974; Williams et al, 1969). Thus, although developmental trajectories were identified (i.e., persistence, recovery, and normally-fluent) for the purposes of the larger study, developmental subgroup classifications were not utilized in the present investigation.…”

“…Unequal contribution of speech disfluencies was also not assumed to factor in to the pooling of data in word-level analyses since word-level measures of stuttering have been found to be consistent across children regardless of subgroup classification (Au-Yeung et al, 1998; Silverman, 1974; Williams et al, 1969). In other words, word-class measures are assumed to be indicative of how SLDs occur in overt speech rather than how individuals stutter.…”

“…It has also been argued that stuttering at the beginning of a sentence is related to greater indecision or uncertainty associated with formulating an idea or constructing a sentence (e.g., Soderberg, 1967; Taylor, 1966). Subsequent work has shown that children are more likely to stutter on function words such as pronouns and conjunctions (Au-Yeung, Howell, & Pilgrim, 1998; Bloodstein & Gantwerk, 1967; Bloodstein & Grossman, 1981; Silverman, 1974; Williams, Silverman, & Kools, 1969), and that this may be related to sentence position as well (e.g., Bloodstein & Gantwerk 1967; Bloodstein & Grossman, 1981). …”

Simultaneous effects on vowel duration in American English: A covariance structure modeling approach

“…For each category ͑short, medium, and long͒ the sentence produced with the greatest number of disfluencies or mispronunciations was eliminated, resulting in six sentences. Disfluencies were coded according to criteria developed by Williams et al ͑1969͒. Mispronunciations were coded as any pronunciation resulting in a change in word or in a nonsense word.…”