Phonetic environment of disfluencies in children with stuttering

Abstract

AbstractPhonological contributions to stuttering have been discussed with increased attention in the recent years. The present study is aimed to analyze the effect of phonological environment during the instances of stuttering. The study included 10 monolingual children with stuttering (CWS) in the age range of 6–8 years, who spoke Kannada (south Indian language) as their mother tongue. Conversation, topic narration, story narration, and picture description tasks were carried out in Kannada language. The relative difficulty of individual syllables for each participant was determined. Further, the effect of phonetic environment (succeeding syllable) during the instances of stuttering was calculated. The results revealed a rank order of relative occurrence of succeeding consonantal contexts. Most of the time, the phonetic environment included voiceless consonants, nasals, and plosives compared to others. This indicated that CWS may have difficulties in the transition of articulatory movement from oral to nasal and from voiced to voiceless consonants during speech production. Findings also revealed variability in the occurrence of phonetic context within and between CWS, which supports the disturbances occurring across various time domains. It is hoped that the findings of the current study will support theorists, researchers, and clinicians in arriving at a more comprehensive understanding of stuttering and phonetic behavior in CWS.