Frequency of verb use in young children who stutter

Several recent studies have suggested that young children who stutter (CWS) tend to show depressed lexical performance relative to peers. Given the developmental literature as well as several studies of verb processing in individuals who stutter, verbs may pose a particular challenge for this group. The purpose of the present study was to examine verb use in CWS. In theory, if young CWS differ in their production of verbs, this finding would partially explain the findings of studies that probed conversational vocabulary skills more generally. Fifteen CWS and 15 children who do not stutter (CWNS) participated in a play-based conversational sample with a parent. Samples were analyzed for the total number of verbs, the number of different verbs, and the proportion of general all-purpose (GAP) verbs within the samples. CWS produced significantly fewer different verbs and total verbs than the CWNS. However, previously reported near-significant differences in utterance length between groups would appear to temper the robustness of this finding. The groups did not differ in the proportion of GAP verbs used, suggesting that the CWS did not over-rely on GAP verbs in conversational language production but rather used these verbs to the same extent as their peers.

As a result of this activity, the participant will be able to: (1) relate the purpose and rationale for examining verb use in children who stutter (CWS); (2) summarize the procedures used to assess verb use and GAP verb use in the present study; (3) explain the findings of the present study; (4) relate findings to the extant literature on lexical diversity in CWS.