Disfluencies in the Conversations of Young Children Who Stutter

Abstract

Parents of children who stutter are often advised to reduce the number of questions they ask their children. Implicit in this advice is the assumption that children who stutter will be more disfluent when answering questions. This study assessed parent-child conversational speech for 8 parent-child pairs to determine the relative amounts of disfluency in the child's responses to questions versus making assertions. Length and complexity of the children's utterances and the frequency of the parents' requests by level of demand were also evaluated. Results suggested that the responses made by the children to their parents' requests were significantly less likely to contain disfluencies than were their assertions. Also, longer and more complex utterances were more likely to contain disfluencies, regardless of their designation as assertions or responses. Parents were shown to favor request types of lower levels of demand in conversations. Requests posed with greater levels of demand were somewhat more likely to yield disfluent responses than were those at a lower demand level.