Syntactic analysis of the spontaneous speech of normally fluent and stuttering children

Abstract

The unrestricted speech of three groups each of stutterers arranged by age and age-matched controls was assessed. Analyses made on utterance length showed that this depended on age group, fluency group, and that age and fluency interacted. The frequency of usage of the various syntactic categories did not differ between the fluency groups though it did depend on the age groups. Examination of the frequency of stutterings for the stutterer groups showed that stuttering varied with syntactic category produced. This was still so after the effects of sentence length and frequency of usage of the syntactic categories were taken out as covariates. Generally speaking the more complex syntactic categories resulted in higher stuttering frequency. This relationship depends on age, with the youngest group showing most dysfluencies on the simpler syntactic categories.