Syntactic Skills of Children who Stutter

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the syntactic and morphological skills of children who stutter and compare them with those of their fluent peers. Subjects were 58 children, chronological ages of 10 years and 58 of their fluent peers matched by age and gender. For testing of syntactic and morphological skills, we used questions from the informal test Expressive scale of Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian language, as in Bosnia and Herzegovina there is yet no standardized instrument for testing language skills. The results showed that the subjects were significantly different only in the use of gender of pronouns and their endings, and in the task of using different sentence structures, where the analysis showed that subjects who stutter use more simple sentence structures. On other tasks children who stutter showed slightly weaker syntactic and morphological skills. The results suggest that children who stutter at school age show slight linguistic delay in compare to their peers. We could say that there is a subgroup of children who stutter, whose language skills are within the normal range, but who are slightly behind their peers in certain linguistic domains.