“…The need to examine growth, rather than skills at onset, is underscored by the fact that children's lexical and syntactic skills are rapidly developing during the time that stuttering has its typical onset, between 2;6 and 3;6 years;months (Bloodstein, 2006). Historically, numerous studies have noted that stuttering is exacerbated during the production of syntactically demanding utterances (e.g., Bauerly & Gottwald, 2009;Bernstein Ratner, 1998;Gaines, Runyan, & Meyers, 1991;Watson, Byrd, & Carlo, 2011). Kinematic studies of the effects of syntactic complexity on fluent speech movement variability have reported that young CWS often cannot even comply with experimental tasks to fluently produce enough trials of longer, more complex utterances (MacPherson & Smith, 2013).…”