Specific subtype of fluency disorder affecting French speaking children: A phonological analysis

Clinicians working with fluency disorders sometimes see children whose word repetitions are mostly located at the end of words and do not induce physical tension. Prior studies on the topic have proposed several names for these disfluencies including "end word repetitions", "final sound repetitions" and "atypical disfluency". The purpose of this study was to use phonological analysis to explore the patterns of this poorly recognized fluency disorder in order to better understand its specific speech characteristics.

We analyzed a spontaneous language sample of 8 French speaking children. Audio and video recordings allowed us to study general communication issues as well as linguistic and acoustical data.

We did not detect speech rupture or coarticulation failures between the syllable onset and rhyme. The problem resides primarily on the rhyme production with a voicing interruption in the middle of the syllable nucleus or a repetition of the rhyme (nucleus alone or nucleus and coda), regardless of the position in the word or phrase.

The present study provides data suggesting that there exist major differences in syllable production between the disfluencies produced by our 8 children and stuttered disfluencies. Consequently, we believe that this fluency disorder should be recognized as distinct from stuttering.