Dworzynski Katharina, Howell Peter, Natke Ulrich
Department of Psychology, University College London, 26 Bedford Way, WC1H 0AP, London, UK.
J Fluency Disord. 2003 Summer;28(2):95-112; quiz 112-3. doi: 10.1016/s0094-730x(03)00009-3.
Brown's factors [J. Speech Disorders 10 (1945) 181] predict the likely loci of disfluency in English-speaking adults who stutter. A word is more likely to be stuttered for these speakers if it is a content word, starts with a consonant, is positioned at the beginning of a sentence, and if it is a long word. These same factors were examined in native German-speaking children and adults who stutter. Speech data of 15 German adults and 17 children were coded according to Brown's factors. For the adult group, it was predicted that words starting with consonants would not lead to as much of an increase in disfluencies compared with English samples, because of cross-linguistic differences in syllable onset properties. It was predicted that stuttering would be more likely in later sentence positions in German because in German the verb is usually near the end of a sentence. There were no obvious reasons to expect differences on the two remaining factors, content words and word length. With children, it was hypothesised that Brown's factors that specify level of linguistic difficulty would not be such a good predictor of stuttering rate. Specifically, it was predicted that the difference in stuttering rate between function and content words would be lower in children. For the adults both word type (content/function) and word length increased stuttering rate significantly, whereas changes in stuttering rate for the other two factors were non-significant. It was also found that when word difficulty (based on a combined measure of all factors) increased, stuttering rate rose. With children, only the word-length factor was significant, and stuttering rate was not governed to the same extent by overall word difficulty. Conclusions are drawn as to the effect of linguistic and motor influences on stuttering.
The reader will learn about and be able to describe: (1) how linguistic factors affect stuttering rates in German; (2) the different patterns of adults and children who stutter and how language might influence this pattern; and (3) how to interpret these findings in light of a current theory of fluency failure.
布朗因素[《言语障碍杂志》10(1945)181]预测了说英语的口吃成年人中可能出现言语不流畅的位置。对于这些说话者来说，如果一个词是实词、以辅音开头、位于句子开头且是长词，那么它更有可能被口吃。在以德语为母语的口吃儿童和成年人中也对这些相同因素进行了研究。15名德国成年人和17名儿童的言语数据根据布朗因素进行了编码。对于成年组，由于音节起始属性的跨语言差异，预计与英语样本相比，以辅音开头的词不会导致言语不流畅增加太多。预计在德语中，口吃在句子靠后的位置更有可能出现，因为在德语中动词通常靠近句子末尾。对于剩下的两个因素，即实词和词长，没有明显理由预期会有差异。对于儿童，假设表明语言难度水平的布朗因素不会是口吃发生率的良好预测指标。具体而言，预计儿童中功能词和实词之间口吃发生率的差异会更小。对于成年人，词的类型（实词/功能词）和词长都显著增加了口吃发生率，而其他两个因素导致的口吃发生率变化不显著。还发现，当词的难度（基于所有因素的综合衡量）增加时，口吃发生率上升。对于儿童，只有词长因素显著，且口吃发生率在相同程度上不受总体词难度的影响。得出了关于语言和运动影响对口吃作用的结论。
读者将了解并能够描述：(1)语言因素如何影响德语中的口吃发生率；(2)口吃的成年人和儿童的不同模式以及语言可能如何影响这种模式；(3)如何根据当前的流畅性障碍理论来解释这些发现。
