Disfluency Behavior of Elementary-School Stutterers and Nonstutterers: Loci of Instances of Disfluency

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Abstract
One hundred fifty-two children from kindergarten and grades one through six, 76 stutterers and 76 nonstutterers, performed a speech task. Each of the kindergarten and first-grade children repeated 10 sentences after the experimenter, and each of the second- through sixth-grade children read a passage. All words judged to have been spoken disfluently were analyzed for the presence of each of Brown’s four word attributes—initial phoneme, grammatical function, sentence position, and word length. Disfluencies were not randomly distributed in the speech of these children. For both stutterers and nonstutterers, disfluencies occurred most frequently on words possessing the same attributes as those reported by Brown to be troublesome for adult stutterers. The findings of this study demonstrate the essential similarity in the loci of instances of disfluency in the speech of (1) children and adults and (2) stutterers and nonstutterers.

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