Stuttering and phonological disorders in children: examination of the Covert Repair Hypothesis

The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether the Covert Repair Hypothesis (CRH; Postma & Kolk, 1993), a theory designed to account for the occurrence of speech disfluencies in adults who stutter, can also account for selected speech characteristics of children who stutter and demonstrate disordered phonology. Subjects were 9 boys who stutter and exhibit normal phonology (S + NP; mean age = 61.33 months; SD = 10.16 months) and 9 boys who stutter and exhibit disordered phonology (S + DP; mean age = 59.11 months; SD = 9.37 months). Selected aspects of each child's speech fluency and phonology were analyzed on the basis of an audio/videotaped picture-naming task and a 30-min conversational interaction with his mother. Results indicated that S + NP and S + DP children are generally comparable in terms of their basic speech disfluency, nonsystematic speech error, and self-repair behaviors. CRH predictions that utterances produced with faster articulatory speaking rates or shorter response time latencies are more likely to contain speech errors or speech disfluencies were not supported. CRH predictions regarding the co-occurrence of speech disfluencies and speech errors were supported for nonsystematic ("slip-of-the-tongue"), but not for systematic (phonological process/rule-bases), speech errors. Furthermore, neither S + NP nor S + DP subjects repaired their systematic speech errors during conversational speech, suggesting that systematic deviations from adult forms may not represent true "errors, " at least for some children exhibiting phonological processes. Findings suggest that speech disfluencies may not represent by-products of self-repairs of systematic speech errors produced during conversational speech, but that self-repairs of nonsystematic speech errors may be related to children's production of speech disfluencies.