title: Characteristics of speech disfluency and stuttering behaviors in 3- and 4-year-old children.
abstract: The purpose of this investigation was to quantitatively and qualitatively characterize speech disfluencies exhibited by 3- and 4-year-old children who do (CWS, N = 36) and do not (CWNS, N = 36) stutter. Five measures of speech disfluency (e.g., percentage of total, other, and stuttering-like disfluencies, mean number of repetition units, and weighted SLD measure) were used in attempts to differentiate CWS from CWNS. Similar measures of stuttering (e.g., percentage of stuttering-like disfluencies consisting of disrhythmic phonations) were used to characterize speech disfluencies in 3- and 4-year-old CWS in relation to time since stuttering onset (TSO). It was hypothesized that such measures of speech disfluency should significantly differ between CWS and CWNS, as well as 3- versus 4-year-old CWS in relation to TSO. Results indicated that 4 out of the 5 dependent measures significantly differed between CWS and CWNS, and within the CWS group there was a significant relationship between TSO and the percentage of stuttering-like disfluencies when the effects of chronological age were partialled out of the regression analyses. Furthermore, 4-year-old CWS exhibited a moderate correlation between TSO and the percentage of stuttering-like disfluencies consisting of disrhythmic phonations, whereas 3-year-old CWS exhibited no such relationship between these two variables. Findings were taken to suggest that certain measures of speech disfluency appreciably differentiate CWS from CWNS and that 4-year-old CWS exhibit changes in nonreiterative forms of stuttering as a function of time since stuttering onset.
authors.affiliation: Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, The Vanderbilt Bill Wilkerson Center for Otolaryngology and Communication Sciences, 1114 19th Avenue South, Nashville, TN 37212 USA. mark.w.pellowski@vanderbilt.edu
authors.forename: Mark W
authors.initials: MW
authors.lastname: Pellowski
authors.forename: Edward G
authors.initials: EG
authors.lastname: Conture
mesh_terms: D000367:Age Factors; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D013060:Speech; D013068:Speech Production Measurement; D013342:Stuttering / Q000503:physiopathology*; D013637:Tape Recording; D014743:Videotape Recording