The linguistic aspects of the speech of Jordanian children who stutter

Linguistic factors and stuttering in Nepali speaking adults who stutter

This study aimed to determine the effect of phonological and morphological factors on the dysfluencies of Nepali-speaking adults who stutter. Eighteen Nepali-speaking adult speakers with mild to very severe developmental stuttering were recruited. The spontaneous speech sample was audio-video recorded and transcribed through orthographic transcription. A total of 350 syllables were analysed to calculate stuttering frequency. Phoneme position, phoneme category, and word length were considered as the phonological factors and word-class as morphological factors. The percentage of stuttering for each of these variables was computed. The study's outcome displayed a significant effect of phoneme position and word length but no effect of phoneme category. Significantly greater stuttering was noticed in the word-initial position and longer words compared to word-medial and shorter words, respectively. In morphological factors, content words and content-function words had a greater stuttering rate than function words. This study showed a significant effect of phoneme position, word length, and grammatical class on the frequency of dysfluency in Nepali-speaking adults who stutter but no effect of phoneme category. The phonetic complexity of these variables may lead to an increase in motor planning demand resulting in more stuttering.

Effect of linguistic factors on the occurrence of stuttering-like disfluency among Japanese-speaking preschool children who stutter

This study aimed to investigate the linguistic factors involved in stuttering among Japanese-speaking preschool children. The participants included 10 Japanese children who stutter, with a mean age of 5 years and 9 months. Speech samples comprised spontaneous conversations of the participants with their parents for about 20 minutes. We compared the percentages of the occurrence of stuttering-like disfluencies (SLDs) at the word and sentence levels, using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test. The results showed no significant differences in SLDs based on syllable structure when comparing light and heavy syllables and comparing consonants and vowels in the initial position of each content word. SLDs occurred more frequently in the initial than non-initial position of words and in longer rather than shorter words. Additionally, SLDs occurred more frequently in sentences that contained more 'bunsetsu' (a kind of linguistic unit in Japanese). Our study is the first to show that both word and sentence-level factors could contribute to SLDs in preschool children who stutter in agglutinating languages, such as Japanese. This aspect is rarely reported in psycholinguistic studies based on stuttering occurrence in inflecting languages, such as English.

Linguistic aspects of stuttering: research updates on the language-fluency interface

PURPOSE

Although commonly defined as a speech disorder, stuttering interacts with the language production system in important ways. Our purpose is to summarize research findings on linguistic variables that influence stuttering assessment and treatment.

METHOD AND RESULTS

Numerous topics are summarized. First, we review research that has examined linguistic features that increase stuttering frequency and influence where it occurs. Second, we tackle the question of whether or not persons who stutter exhibit subtle language differences or deficits. Next, we explore language factors that appear to influence recovery from early stuttering in children. The final topic discusses the unique challenges inherent in differentially diagnosing stuttering in bilingual children. Clinical implications for each topic are discussed.

DISCUSSION

The article concludes with a discussion of the unique differences in the integration of language and speech demands by people who stutter, when compared to people who are typically fluent, and their clinical ramifications.

Effect of phonological and morphological factors on speech disfluencies of Kannada speaking preschool children who stutter

PURPOSE

Empirical investigations have revealed a strong association between linguistic factors and stuttering, specifically phonological and morphological factors. However, the effect of these factors is suggested to vary across languages owing to the differences in their linguistic structure. Further, the trend is found to vary between AWS and CWS. Literature in this regard is scarce in the Kannada language, particularly in children. Hence, the study was driven by the need to understand the effect of phonological and morphological factors on stuttering in Kannada speaking CWS.

METHOD

Spontaneous speech samples were obtained from twenty Kannada speaking preschool CWS with a confirmed diagnosis of stuttering by an experienced speech-language pathologist. The recorded samples were transcribed, and disfluencies were marked. Further, the stuttered words were analysed for phonological and morphological features. The phonological factors included were phoneme position in a word, phoneme type and word length. Morphological factors consisted of word class and word end inflectional morphology. The percentage of stuttering was calculated with respect to each of the factors mentioned above.

RESULTS

Phoneme in the initial position of a word and words beginning with consonants had a higher rate of stuttering. Word length, word class and word end inflections were found to have no significant effect on the rate of stuttering in CWS.

CONCLUSION

Overall, current findings revealed that stuttering might manifest differently across languages varying in their linguistic structures.