Purpose: Disfluencies can be classified as stuttering-like disfluencies (SLDs) or typical disfluencies (TDs). Dividing TDs further, stalls (fillers and repetitions) are thought to be prospective, occurring due to planning glitches, and revisions (word and phrase revisions, word fragments) are thought to be retrospective, occurring when a speaker…

Purpose: Bilingual children often demonstrate a high rate of disfluencies, which might impact the diagnostic evaluation of fluency disorders; however, research on the rates and types of disfluencies in bilinguals' two languages is limited. The purpose of this research is to profile disfluencies of two types, stuttering-like disfluencies (SLDs) and…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate how epidemiological and clinical factors collectively predict whether a preschooler who is stuttering will persist or recover and to provide guidance on how clinicians can use these factors to evaluate a child's risk for stuttering persistence. Method: We collected epidemiological and clinical…

Purpose: Disfluencies associated with stuttering generally occur in the initial position of words. This study reviews data from a school-age child with an atypical stuttering profile consisting predominantly of word-final disfluencies (WFDs). Our primary goals were to identify patterns in overt features of WFDs and to extend our understanding of…

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…

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…

There is a pressing need in Iran for the translation of widely used speech-language assessment tools into Persian. This study reports the interjudge and intrajudge reliability of a Persian translation of the Stuttering Severity Instrument-3 (SSI-3) (Riley, 1994). There was greater than 80% interjudge and intrajudge agreement on scale scores for…

Relatively recently, experimental studies of linguistic processing speed in children who stutter (CWS) have emerged, some of which suggest differences in performance among CWS compared to children who do not stutter (CWNS). What is not yet well understood is the extent to which underlying cognitive skills may impact performance on timed tasks of…

The purpose of the present study was (1) to determine whether speech rate, utterance length, and grammatical complexity (number of clauses and clausal constituents per utterance) influenced stuttering-like disfluencies as children became more disfluent at the end of a 1200-syllable speech sample [Sawyer, J., & Yairi, E. (2006). "The effect of…

This study compared the disfluencies of German-speaking preschool children who stutter (CWS, N=24) with those produced by age- and sex-matched comparison children who do not stutter (CWNS, N=24). In accordance with Yairi and Ambrose's [Yairi, E., & Ambrose, N. (1992). A longitudinal study of stuttering in children: A preliminary report.…

This study compared duration characteristics of single repetitions of single-syllable words in the speech of 15 preschool children near the onset of stuttering to those of 18 nonstuttering children. There appeared to be a tendency for repetitions of very early stutterers to be faster than repetitions of nonstuttering children. (Author/DB)

This investigation compared changes in articulatory rate over a period of 2 years in subgroups of preschool children who stutter (either persistently or who recovered without intervention) and normally fluent children. Results indicated no significant differences among the three groups when articulation rate was measured in syllables per second,…

Seventy-nine children (ages 3 through 7) were asked to discriminate between the speech (fluent and disfluent) of two puppets, identify the one who "speaks like you," and evaluate their speech. Children from age 3 showed evidence of some awareness of disfluencies but most children reached full awareness at 5. Negative evaluation of…

Background: Data have accumulated to show that the Lidcombe Program of early stuttering intervention is a safe treatment with positive outcomes for preschoolers who stutter, and a randomized controlled trial is under way at the time of writing. Program components have not been investigated experimentally so the functionality of each component is…

This volume examines the ramifications of individual differences in therapy outcomes for a wide variety of communication disorders. In an era where evidence-based practice is the clinical profession's watchword, each chapter attacks this highly relevant issue from a somewhat different perspective. In some areas of communication disorders,…