The effects of syntactic complexity on the occurrence of disfluencies in 5 year old nonstutterers

Abstract

The effect of syntactic complexity on the number of disfluencies for sentence imitation and sentence modeling production tasks was studied in a sample of 5 year old nonstutterers. The subjects repeated 30 sentences representing six different syntactic constructions: (1) simple affirmative active declarative with auxiliary + ing, (2) negative with contraction, (3) future, (4) negative interrogative with contraction, (5) passive, and (6) auxiliary have with copula + ing. For the modeled sentence production task, the subjects modeled 30 sentences from pictures that represented the same six syntactic constructions as in the sentence imitation task. Subject responses were tape-recorded, and the number of disfluencies was counted for each subject for each stimulus sentence. A significant difference among the number of disfluencies occurring on the six sentence constructions was not found on the sentence imitation task. Significant differences among the number of disfluencies occurring on the sentence constructions, however, were evident for the sentence-modeling task. Results are discussed with regard to the effect of different sentence production tasks and varying syntactic complexity on the occurrence of normal disfluencies in preschool children.