Effect of word accent on the difficulty of transition from core vowels in first syllables to the following segments in Japanese children who stutter.

Matsumoto-Shimamori, Ito, Fukuda, and Fukuda (2011) proposed the hypothesis that the transition from the core vowel (i.e. syllable nucleus) in the first syllable of a word to the following segment significantly affects the occurrence of stuttering in Japanese. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether word accent (i.e. an abrupt pitch fall in Japanese) affects the production difficulty of the transition from the core vowel in the first syllable of a word to the following segment in Japanese. The participants were 25 Japanese children who stuttered, ranging in age from 6;4 to 12;5. A two- and three-syllable word naming task was used. The frequency of stuttering was not significantly different between the words with and without an abrupt pitch fall, and among those whose positions of an abrupt pitch fall were different. These results suggest that word accent does not have a significant effect on the difficulty of the transition from the core vowel in the first syllable of a word in Japanese.