The influences of speech rate, utterance length and sentence complexity of disfluency in preschool children who stutter and children who do not stutter

Abstract

According to Demand and Capacity Model (DCM), external and internal environments influence the disfluency of children who stutter (CWS). This study investigated the effects of simultaneous changes in motoric and linguistic demands on CWS and children who do not stutter (CWNS). Participants were 4–6 years old CWS and CWNS. A sentence imitation task with changes in speech rate, utterance length, and sentence complexity was used to examine their effects on children’s disfluency. When the utterance length changed, CWS showed more disfluency regardless of utterance length and as the speech rate changed, CWS showed more disfluency at fast speech rate than CWNS. When the utterance length and speech rate changed, at fast speech rate, CWS showed more disfluency in both utterances than CWNS. When sentence complexity changed, CWS showed more disfluency than CWNS in complex sentences. Changes in linguistic elements such as speech rate, utterance length, and sentence complexity affect disfluency in CWS, especially when they were exposed to faster, longer, and more complex sentences. This indicates that CWS are vulnerable to fast and complex speech motor control and language processing ability than CWNS. Thus, this study suggests that parents and therapists consider both the speech rate and the utterance length when talking with CWS.