The topography of beginning stuttering

Presently, there are a number of protocols available to assist speech-language pathologists in the identification of early stuttering (Gordon and Luper, 1992). While such protocols offer guidelines for differentiating children who stutter from those who are normally disfluent, the criteria for doing so is frequently based on clinical observation, and often suffers from limited empirical support. The purpose of this paper is to provide an update and "recalibration" of what we currently know to be the salient behaviors of beginning stuttering, and how specific features of these behaviors distinguish stuttering children form their normally disfluent counterparts. Specifically, studies examining (1) frequency, (2) type, and (3) duration of disfluency, including number of repeated units and additional temporal aspects of instances of sound, syllable, and whole-word repetition, as well as (4) associated speech and nonspeech behaviors produced by children who stutter will be reviewed, and comparisons to normally speaking children will be made when possible. With a few exceptions, discussion will be limited to those studies which specifically examined the speech of preschool children, or which purported to include children close to the onset of stuttering, regardless of age.