Word Position and Grammatical Function in Relation to Preschoolers' Speech Disfluency

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Abstract
Spontaneous speech samples were tape-recorded from 10 4-yr.-old nonstutterers in their nursery school classroom and in an interview situation. The samples were analyzed to determine whether the children tended to be disfluent on initial words of utterances and on pronouns and conjunctions. The tendency for beginning stutterers to stutter on such words is considered part of the symptomatology of Phase I, or beginning, stuttering. The children in this study demonstrated a statistically significant tendency in both situations to be disfluent on these words. Thus, the tendency to produce speech interruptions at the beginning of utterances and on pronouns and conjunctions appears to be a characteristic of young children's speech production rather than an aspect of the symptomatology of beginning stuttering.

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