Limura Daichi, Takahashi Saburo, Fukazawa Natsuki, Morita Natsumi, Oe Takuya, Miyamoto Shoko
Faculty of Rehabilitation, Kawasaki University of Medical Welfare, Okayama, Japan.
Graduate School of Comprehensive Human Sciences, University of Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan.
Clin Linguist Phon. 2023 Jan 2;37(1):1-16. doi: 10.1080/02699206.2021.2001048. Epub 2021 Nov 29.
This study aimed to investigate the linguistic factors involved in stuttering among Japanese-speaking preschool children. The participants included 10 Japanese children who stutter, with a mean age of 5 years and 9 months. Speech samples comprised spontaneous conversations of the participants with their parents for about 20 minutes. We compared the percentages of the occurrence of stuttering-like disfluencies (SLDs) at the word and sentence levels, using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test. The results showed no significant differences in SLDs based on syllable structure when comparing light and heavy syllables and comparing consonants and vowels in the initial position of each content word. SLDs occurred more frequently in the initial than non-initial position of words and in longer rather than shorter words. Additionally, SLDs occurred more frequently in sentences that contained more 'bunsetsu' (a kind of linguistic unit in Japanese). Our study is the first to show that both word and sentence-level factors could contribute to SLDs in preschool children who stutter in agglutinating languages, such as Japanese. This aspect is rarely reported in psycholinguistic studies based on stuttering occurrence in inflecting languages, such as English.
本研究旨在调查说日语的学龄前儿童口吃所涉及的语言因素。参与者包括10名口吃的日本儿童，平均年龄为5岁9个月。言语样本包括参与者与父母约20分钟的自然对话。我们使用威尔科克森符号秩检验比较了单词和句子层面口吃样不流畅（SLD）的出现百分比。结果显示，在比较轻音节和重音节以及比较每个实词起始位置的辅音和元音时，基于音节结构的SLD没有显著差异。SLD在单词的起始位置比非起始位置更频繁出现，在较长单词中比在较短单词中更频繁出现。此外，SLD在包含更多“文节”（日语中的一种语言单位）的句子中更频繁出现。我们的研究首次表明，单词和句子层面的因素都可能导致说黏着语（如日语）的学龄前口吃儿童出现SLD。在基于屈折语（如英语）口吃发生情况的心理语言学研究中，这一方面很少被报道。
