University of Missouri, , MO, USA.
J Fluency Disord. 2009 Dec;34(4):242-56. doi: 10.1016/j.jfludis.2009.09.004. Epub 2009 Oct 9.
Young children with typical fluency demonstrate a range of disfluencies, or speech disruptions. One type of disruption, revision, appears to increase in frequency as syntactic skills develop. To date, this phenomenon has not been studied in children who stutter (CWS). Rispoli, Hadley, and Holt (2008) suggest a schema for categorizing speech disruptions in terms of revisions and stalls. The purpose of this exploratory study was to use this schema to evaluate whether CWS show a pattern over time in their production of stuttering, revisions, and stalls. Nine CWS, ages 2;1 to 4;11, participated in the study, producing language samples each month for 10 months. MLU and vocd analyses were performed for samples across three time periods. Active declarative sentences within these samples were examined for the presence of disruptions. Results indicated that the proportion of sentences containing revisions increased over time, but proportions for stalls and stuttering did not. Visual inspection revealed that more stuttering and stalls occurred on longer utterances than on shorter utterances. Upon examination of individual children's language, it appears two-thirds of the children showed a pattern in which, as MLU increased, revisions increased as well. Findings are similar to studies of children with typical fluency, suggesting that, despite the fact that CWS display more (and different) disfluencies relative to typically fluent peers, revisions appear to increase over time and correspond to increases in MLU, just as is the case with peers.
The reader will be able to: (1) describe the three types of speech disruptions assessed in this article; (2) compare present findings of disruptions in children who stutter to findings of previous research with children who are typically fluent; and (3) discuss future directions in this area of research, given the findings and implications of this study.
具有典型流畅性的幼儿表现出一系列不流畅或言语中断。其中一种中断类型，即修正，似乎随着句法技能的发展而频率增加。迄今为止，这种现象尚未在口吃儿童（CWS）中进行研究。Rispoli、Hadley 和 Holt（2008 年）提出了一种根据修正和停顿来分类言语中断的模式。这项探索性研究的目的是使用该模式来评估 CWS 在其口吃、修正和停顿的产生中是否随着时间呈现出一种模式。9 名年龄在 2；1 到 4；11 岁的 CWS 参加了该研究，在 10 个月的时间里每月进行一次语言样本采集。对三个时间段的样本进行 MLU 和 vocd 分析。在这些样本中，对主动陈述句中是否存在中断进行了检查。结果表明，随着时间的推移，包含修正的句子比例增加，但停顿和口吃的比例没有增加。通过视觉检查，发现口吃和停顿更多地出现在较长的话语上，而不是较短的话语上。在检查个别儿童的语言时，似乎三分之二的儿童表现出一种模式，即随着 MLU 的增加，修正也随之增加。这些发现与具有典型流畅性的儿童的研究相似，表明尽管 CWS 与典型流畅的同龄人相比表现出更多（和不同）的不流畅，但修正似乎随着时间的推移而增加，并且与 MLU 的增加相对应，就像同龄人的情况一样。
读者将能够：（1）描述本文评估的三种类型的言语中断；（2）将目前口吃儿童中断的发现与以前具有典型流畅性儿童的研究发现进行比较；（3）鉴于该研究的发现和影响，讨论该研究领域的未来方向。
