| The purpose of this study was to document the occurrence of stuttering on function and content words in relation to utterance complexity in 3- to 5-year-old children who stutter. Participants were thirty-six, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds, with 12 participants in each age group. With the exception of stuttering, all participants had speech, language, and hearing development within normal limits. Dependent variables (e.g., percent stuttering on function words in simple vs. complex utterances) were based on transcription of 15--20 minute speech samples collected in identical lab settings for all participants during a loosely-structured parent-child interaction. Results indicated that all three age groups had more stuttering-like disfluency (SLD) on function than content words regardless of syntactic complexity. Although this relation between word type and SLD was not appreciably influenced by children's severity of stuttering, variability in this relation between participants decreased with chronological age and time since onset of stuttering. Furthermore, for all three age groups, there were more function words produced in utterances with complex syntax. Findings were taken to suggest that there is a significant influence of word type (function vs. content words) on the production of SLDs that is relatively independent of other aspects of language development (i.e., the development of complex syntax). However, the influence of the proportion of function versus content words within the utterance may contribute to whether an utterance contains SLDs. Perhaps difficulties CWS have acquiring and mastering usage of function words may contribute to the emergence of stuttering in early childhood, the age range where speech-language development is extensive. |
