Speaking rate, conversational speech acts, interruption, and linguistic complexity of 20 pre-school stuttering and non-stuttering children and their mothers

Abstract

This is the second in a series of reports concerning stuttering pre-school children enrolled in a longitudinal study; the first was Ryan (1992). Conversational samples of 20 stuttering and 20 non-stuttering pre-school children and their mothers were analysed for speaking rate, conversational speech acts, interruption, and linguistic complexity. Between-group analyses revealed few differences between either the two children or two mother groups. Within-group analyses indicated differences that involved conversational speech acts and linguistic complexity. Most stuttering occurred on statements (M = 32.3% stuttered) and questions (M = 20.9% stuttered). Stuttered and disfluent sentences had higher Developmental Sentence Scoring (DSS) (Lee, 1974) scores (M = 10.9, 12.9, respectively) than fluent sentences (M = 7.6). Multiple correlation analyses indicated that speaking rate of mothers (0.561) and normal disfluency of children (0.396) were major predictor variables.