Stuttering Frequency on Content and Function Words in Adults Who Stutter

Abstract

This study investigated stuttering frequency as a function of grammatical word type (i.e., content and function). Ten adults who stutter participated. Participants recited aloud a list of 126 words consisting of an equal number of content and function words, which were presented individually and visually via a laptop computer. Each word belonged to a single grammatical category. Further, words were matched for initial sound and approximate number of syllables. The results indicated that adults who stutter exhibited significantly greater stuttering frequency on content words when presented in isolation (p = 0.018). It was conjectured that the responsible factor contributing to differences in stuttering frequency in adults who stutter resides in word frequency disparities between the two classes of words categories. That is, because the function words are limited in number and are used frequently, repeated use on the part of adults who stutter may lead to a generalized adaptation effect for function words and hence reduced stuttering frequency (as compared with content words).

Linguistic stress, within-word position, and grammatical class in relation to early childhood stuttering

“…Secondly, a difference in stuttering frequency for content and function words 1 is also related to variations in stress patterns for these two grammatical classes. Studies on grammatical class in adults who stutter report either a higher stuttering frequency for content words than for function words or no difference (for an overview see Dayalu, Kalinowski, Stuart, Holbert, & Rastatter, 2002). In English as well as in German function words are usually unstressed, whereas content words carry stress, which means that grammatical class and stress are confounded.…”

Childhood stuttering and dissociations across linguistic domains

“…These linguistic factors have also been shown to influence the fluency with which words are produced in adolescents and adults who stutter (e.g., Bergmann, 1986;Brown, 1945;Danzger & Halpern, 1973;Hubbard & Prins, 1994;Klouda & Cooper, 1988;Natke, Grosser, Sandrieser, & Kalveram, 2002;Prins, Hubbard, & Krause, 1991;Ronson, 1976;Wingate, 1984). However, unlike young CWS, older children and adults tend to stutter more on content words than function words (e.g., Brown, 1938a,b;Dayalu, Kalinowski, Stuart, Holbert, & Rastatter, 2002;Howell et al, 1999). Taken together, the relatively consistent association observed between certain utterance characteristics and the loci of stuttering seems to suggest that there may be an interaction between linguistic processing and instances of stuttering.…”

Stuttering Frequency on Meaningful and Nonmeaningful Words in Adults Who Stutter

“…It was also suggested that spontaneous speech and continuous text reading are the very 'genesis' for the generalized adaptation to occur as the limited set of function words are repeatedly used in these tasks when compared to a larger pool of content words [31] . As most of the studies conducted to explore the role of content and function words on stuttering frequency have used spontaneous speech tasks and reading text [30] , it is possible that the results are contaminated by the presence of generalized adaptation. Although unnatural, the use of word lists appears to be an appropriate tool to study the effects of linguistic variables on stuttering frequency as it allows for greater control of infl uencing factors.…”

“…These results challenge the notion that meaningfulness of a word is a tenable predictor of stuttering frequency. A recent study investigating stuttering frequency on content and function words suggested that inherent variations in word frequency among these two words categories might trigger the differences in stuttering frequency [30] . It was proposed that the effect of word frequency on stuttering frequency was due to a process called 'generalized adaptation'.…”