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…

This book contains contributions by scholars working on diverse aspects of speech who bring their findings to bear on the practical issue of how to treat stuttering in different language groups and in multilingual speakers. The book considers classic issues in speech production research, as well as whether regions of the brain that are affected in…

Speech analysis of 10 two- to three-year-olds diagnosed by parents as having begun stuttering and 10 matched normally speaking children indicated that stutterers were three times more disfluent than nonstutterers. Part-word repetitions and sound prolongations were found to distinguish the two groups significantly. (Author/CL)

The paper summarizes recent thinking on several aspects of early childhood stuttering, including the acquisition of fluency in young children and its relationship to language acquisition, the relationship of normal childhood nonfluencies to early stuttering, stuttering's relationship to language acquisition, and psycholinguistic influences on…

A study compared the laryngeal behavior associated with the perceptually fluent speech of 3-to-7-year-old stutterers (N=8) to that of normally fluent peers (N=8). Analysis of electroglottograph readings indicated that normally fluent children exhibited significantly more typical patterns during consonant-vowel and vowel-consonant transitions than…

Presents evidence suggesting that the difference between stuttering and normal nonfluency in young children is one of degree only. It hypothesizes that heavy pressure on the child to speak well increases nonfluency. Bibliography. (RW)

Disfluency characteristics of 36 nonstuttering boys aged two, four, and six years were analyzed from tape recorded speech samples made during free play within neutral and stress situations. Comparisons of frequency of disfluency were made among the different ages within each situation and between the neutral and stress situations. (Author)

This is one of few professional books that addresses the subject of stuttering in young children. This is surprising considering that most cases of stuttering begin in the preschool years and that the prevalence of the disorder in very young children is higher than in any other age group. This excellent and informative text is written for…