Speech fluency in bilinguals who stutter: Language proficiency and attentional demands as mediating factors.

Purpose: The current study examines how speech disfluencies manifest themselves in the two languages of bilingual persons who stutter, starting from the hypothesis that stuttering is associated with an attentional deficit at the level of speech production.

Methods: Twenty-eight bilingual people who stutter performed a spontaneous and a controlled speech production task, once in their dominant and once in their non-dominant language. The controlled production task (i.