This mixed methods investigation sought to explore the effectiveness of a stuttering training module with preservice teachers. Stigmatizing attitudes about people who stutter (PWS) have been found not only in society at large, but also in specific groups including teachers. Misinformation about stuttering in educators can render early experiences…

Stuttering, the repetition of voice, syllable or sentence, is a speech and social communication disorder that negatively affects the fluency of speech. Students who stutter are often socially isolated in school, and also experience high anxiety and communication difficulty at different levels. With the study reported on here we investigated…

Purpose: The purpose of the present clinical forum is to compare how 2 clinicians might select among therapy options for a preschool-aged child who presents with stuttering close to onset. Method: I discuss approaches to full evaluation of the child's profile, advisement of evidence-based practice options open to the family, the need for…

Children's frequency of stuttering can be affected by utterance length, syntactic complexity, and lexical content of language. Using a unique small-scale within-subjects design, this study explored whether language samples that contain more stuttering have (a) longer, (b) syntactically more complex, and (c) lexically more diverse utterances than…

Purpose: Stuttering involves a breakdown in the speech motor system. We address whether stuttering in its early stage is specific to the speech motor system or whether its impact is observable across motor systems. Method: As an extension of Olander, Smith, and Zelaznik (2010), we measured bimanual motor timing performance in 115 children: 70…

Phonetically governed changes in the fundamental frequency (F[subscript 0]) of vowels that immediately precede and follow voiceless stop plosives have been found to follow consistent patterns in adults and children as young as four years of age. In the present study, F[subscript 0] onset and offset patterns in 14 children who stutter (CWS) and 14…

Purpose: The purpose of the present study was to investigate the underlying constructs of the Communication Attitude Test for Preschool and Kindergarten Children Who Stutter (KiddyCAT; Vanryckeghem & Brutten, 2007), especially those related to awareness of stuttering and negative speech-associated attitudes. Method: Participants were 114…

There is a substantial amount of literature reporting the incidence of phonological difficulties to be higher for children who stutter when compared to normally fluent children, suggesting a link between stuttering and phonology. In view of this, the purpose of the investigation was to determine whether, among children who stutter, there are…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between articulation rate, frequency and duration of disfluencies of different types, and temperament in preschool children who stutter (CWS). In spontaneous speech samples from 19 CWS (mean age = 3:9; years:months), we measured articulation rate, the frequency and duration of (a) sound…

Purpose: To explore the effects of utterance length, syntactic complexity, and grammatical correctness on stuttering in the spontaneous speech of young, monolingual Spanish-speaking children. Method: Spontaneous speech samples of 11 monolingual Spanish-speaking children who stuttered, ages 35 to 70 months, were examined. Mean number of syllables,…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate characteristics of four types of utterances in preschool children who stutter: perceptually fluent, containing normal disfluencies (OD utterance), containing stuttering-like disfluencies (SLD utterance), and containing both normal and stuttering-like disfluencies (SLD+OD utterance).…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to identify whether different patterns of errors exist in irregular past-tense verbs in children who stutter (CWS) and children who do not stutter (CWNS). Method: Spontaneous language samples of thirty-one age- and gender-matched pairs of children (total N = 62) between the ages of 24 months and 59 months were…

The primary purpose of this study was to re-examine the influence of phonetic complexity on stuttering in young children through the use of the Word Complexity Measure (WCM). Parent-child conversations were transcribed for 14 children who stutter (mean age = 3 years, 7 months; SD = 11.20 months). Lexical and linguistic factors were accounted for…

Teachers often report difficulty in knowing how to best help a child who stutters in the classroom. Many children who stutter can handle oral reading tasks satisfactorily, particularly if they are encouraged to practice at home. Some, however, will stutter severely while reading aloud in class. Teachers should always keep in mind that each child…

The purpose of the present investigation was to examine the relation between utterance complexity and utterance position and the tendency to stutter on function words in preschool-age children who stutter (CWS). Two separate studies involving two different groups of participants (Study 1, n = 30; Study 2, n = 30) were conducted. Participants were…