Comparison of pausing behavior in children who stutter and children who have Asperger syndrome

The objective of this research was to compare the number and types of grammatical and non-grammatical silent pauses presented by stutterers and subjects with Asperger syndrome in their narratives.

Ten children who stutter and four participants with Asperger syndrome (mean ages of both groups 10 years) were assessed at the Speech and Language Disorders Department of the Universidade Federal de São Paulo/Brasil. They narrated a story based on a pre-selected sequence of pictures. They were filmed and their productions were analyzed using version 5.0.47 of Praat (http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/download_win.html). Silent intervals in the speech that ranged from 0.25 to 4s were considered pauses. The pauses were classified as grammatical and non-grammatical, depending on the words that preceded and followed them.

Both groups presented grammatical and non-grammatical pauses and the former predominated. The children with Asperger syndrome produced a greater number of pauses than the stutterers.

The reader will be able to: (1) characterize the use of pauses in the oral narrative; (2) distinguish a grammatical pause from a non-grammatical pause regarding the use and function; (3) recognize the pattern of pause found in the two populations.