Variability of Preschool Stuttering During a Day

Severity ratings (SRs) of children's stuttering assigned by parents and speech-language pathologists (SLPs) have advantages over methods based on stuttering counts. They are valid, simple, and convenient; without cost; and can be used without the child's awareness. The aim of this project was to study, for the first time, the use of an SR scale by parents and SLPs to track stuttering severity for preschool children over a typical day. For that purpose, we used 10 case studies.

Participants were 10 preschool children who stuttered (3-4 years of age) and their parents. Each child's speech was audio-recorded by their parent for an entire day at home, commencing at approximately 8:00 a.m. During that day, an SLP made a randomly timed phone call, during which a 10-min sample of the child's speech was audio-recorded. At the end of the day, both before and after training in the use of a 10-point scale, parents assigned a "typical" SR score for their child's speech for the day. An independent SLP later assigned an SR to each 15-min segment of each child's recording from across the day.

The severity of all children's stuttering varied throughout the day, and in more than half the children, it varied by as much as 4-6 SR scale values. SRs showed no consistent trend of stuttering increasing or decreasing during the day. There was close correspondence between parent- and SLP-assigned SRs for the day. Parent training in the use of the scale, which occurred at the end of the day of recording, did not change that correspondence. A random 10-min speech sample provided a reasonably valid SR score to represent typical stuttering for the entire day.

These findings can be applied in clinical and research contexts where measurement of early stuttering may be used to monitor a child's speech for a substantive period.