It's About Time: Parent-Child Turn-Taking in Early Stuttering

Area of Science:

• Speech-language pathology
• Childhood communication disorders
• Linguistic research

Background:

• Parental modification of conversational temporal features is a common strategy to aid children who stutter (CWS).
• This includes advice on slowing adult speech, increasing response-time latencies (RTLs), and reducing interruptions.
• The efficacy of these temporal adjustments remains an area of investigation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To examine the relationship between parental speech rate and response-time latencies (RTLs) and the fluency of children who stutter (CWS).
• To evaluate the baseline effectiveness of common parental advice regarding temporal interaction modifications.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of baseline data from the Illinois International Stuttering Research Project at FluencyBank.
• Inclusion of 13 persistent CWS, 28 recovered CWS, and 21 children who do not stutter.
• Utilized CLAN software with audio linkage to Praat for data analysis.

Main Results:

• No significant group differences were found in baseline speech rate or RTL.
• Parents of children with persistent stuttering exhibited the slowest speech rates prior to advisement.
• No correlations were detected between parental speech rate or RTL and the child's fluency.

Conclusions:

• Current findings do not support the common advice for parents to modify temporal interaction parameters for therapeutic benefit in CWS.
• This retrospective observational study highlights the need for caution in interpreting results.
• Further analysis of post-advisement samples is underway to assess potential benefits of guidance.