Sentence position and syntactic complexity of stuttering in early childhood: a longitudinal study

The purpose of the present investigation was to assess longitudinal word- and sentence-level measures of stuttering in young children. Participants included 12 stuttering and non-stuttering children between 36 and 71 months of age at an initial visit who exhibited a range of stuttering rates. Parent-child spontaneous speech samples were obtained over a period of two years at six-month intervals. Each speech sample was transcribed, and both stuttering-like disfluencies (SLDs) and other disfluencies (ODs) were coded. Word- and sentence-level measures of SLDs were used to assess linguistic characteristics of stuttering. Results of the word-level analysis indicated that stuttering was most likely to occur at the sentence-initial position, and that a tendency to stutter on function words was present only at the sentence-initial position. Results of the sentence-level analyses indicated that sentences containing ODs and those containing SLDs were both significantly longer and more complex than fluent sentences, but did not differ from each other. Word- and sentence-level measures also did not change across visits. Results were taken to suggest that both SLDs and ODs originate during the same stage of sentence planning.

The reader will be able to: (1) describe the importance of sentence position in the occurrence of speech disfluencies, (2) describe the relation between sentence complexity and the occurrence of speech disfluencies, and (3) describe the potential role of different aspects of sentence planning on the occurrence of speech disfluencies.