The impact of word-end phonology and morphology on stuttering

This paper investigates whether stuttering rates in English-speaking adults and children are influenced by phonological and morphological complexity at the ends of words. The phonology of English inflection is such that morphological and phonological complexity are confounded, and previous research has indicated that phonological complexity influences stuttering. Section 1 of this paper considers how to disentangle phonological and morphological complexity so that the impact of each on stuttering can be tested. Section 2 presents an analysis of some adult corpus data, and shows that phonological and morphological complexity at the word end do not influence stuttering rates for English-speaking adults, at least in spontaneous speech. Section 3 presents results from a non-word repetition task and a past tense elicitation task which reveal that while word-end phonological and morphological complexity do not affect stuttering rates in most of the adults and children tested, a small proportion of adults and children do stutter over morphologically complex words in an elicitation task. Taken as a whole, these results suggest that morphology has an impact on stuttering for some individuals in certain circumstances.