Effect of selected work attributes on preschoolers' speech disfluency: initial phoneme and length

This study was designed to determine whether preschool nonstutterers tend to be disfluent on words that begin with consonants or on words that begin with vowels and whether they tend to be disfluent on long or on short words. Analyses of the spontaneous speech of 10 four-year-old boys sampled both in their nursery school classroom and in an interview situation indicated that initial phoneme exerted no influence on the distribution of their speech disfluencies. Word length, however, exerted an influence in the interview situation where the children tended to be disfluent on monosyllabic words. These data raise questions with respect to the applicability of Bloodstein's (1974) model of the development of stuttering to the disfluency behavior of nonstutterers.