Some empirical observations about early stuttering: a possible link to language development.

Unlabelled: This article suggests a possible link between incipient stuttering and early difficulty in language formulation. The hypothesis offers a unifying explanation of an array of empirical observations. Among these observations are the following: early stuttering occurs only on the first word of a syntactic structure; stuttering does not appear to be influenced by word-related factors; early stuttering seldom occurs on one-word utterances; the earliest age at which stuttering is reported is 18 months, with the beginning of grammatical development; the age at which most onset of stuttering is reported, 2-5 years, coincides with the period during which children acquire syntax; considerable spontaneous recovery takes place at the time most children have mastered syntax; incipient stuttering is influenced by the length and grammatical complexity of utterances; young children who stutter may be somewhat deficient in language skills; boys who stutter outnumber girls.

Early stuttering as a type of language difficulty.

The reader will learn about and be able to describe (1) the characteristics of incipient stuttering, (2) how it differs from stuttering in older children, and (3) the relationship of such early stuttering to developing language skills.

Early stutterings: some aspects of their form and distribution.

The speech of five stutterers ranging in age from 3 years, 10 months to 5 years, 7 months was analyzed to determine the types and loci of stutterings. Word repetition was the most frequent feature in three cases and one of the two predominant features in the remaining two cases. Almost without exception, word repetitions occurred at the beginning of syntactic units.

Effect of adjacency on the distribution of new stutterings in two successive readings.

The consistency with which stuttering tends to occur on the same words in successive readings of a passage, though high enough to warrant the assumption that stuttering is a response to stimuli, is generally far from perfect. It was hypothesized that this is partly because stuttering sometimes occurs adjacent to previously stuttered words rather than on them, as a result of a type of adjacency effect. Ten stutterers read a 300-word passage twice in succession.

Stuttering and sentence length.

The purpose of this study was to determine whether sentence length influences the frequency of stuttering. Fourteen stutterers read, in random order, 20 long and 20 short sentences. The long sentences were constructed by means of additions to the short ones: for example, She learned to swim and She learned to swim in the clear water of the lake.