title: Effects of length, complexity, and grammatical correctness on stuttering in Spanish-speaking preschool children.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  To explore the effects of utterance length, syntactic complexity, and grammatical correctness on stuttering in the spontaneous speech of young, monolingual Spanish-speaking children.
  
  
  METHODS
  Spontaneous speech samples of 11 monolingual Spanish-speaking children who stuttered, ages 35 to 70 months, were examined. Mean number of syllables, total number of clauses, utterance complexity (i.e., containing no clauses, simple clauses, or subordinate and/or conjoined clauses), and grammatical correctness (i.e., the presence or absence of morphological and syntactical errors) in stuttered and fluent utterances were compared.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Findings revealed that stuttered utterances in Spanish tended to be longer and more often grammatically incorrect, and contain more clauses, including more subordinate and/or conjoined clauses. However, when controlling for the interrelatedness of syllable number and clause number and complexity, only utterance length and grammatical incorrectness were significant predictors of stuttering in the spontaneous speech of these Spanish-speaking children. Use of complex utterances did not appear to contribute to the prediction of stuttering when controlling for utterance length.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Results from the present study were consistent with many earlier reports of English-speaking children. Both length and grammatical factors appear to affect stuttering in Spanish-speaking children. Grammatical errors, however, served as the greatest predictor of stuttering.
authors.affiliation: Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, USA. j.watson@tcu.edu
authors.forename: Jennifer B
authors.initials: JB
authors.lastname: Watson
authors.forename: Courtney T
authors.initials: CT
authors.lastname: Byrd
authors.forename: Edna J
authors.initials: EJ
authors.lastname: Carlo
mesh_terms: D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D007807:Language Tests / Q000592:standards; D008037:Linguistics; D016015:Logistic Models; D008297:Male; D011237:Predictive Value of Tests; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D013342:Stuttering / Q000175:diagnosis*