Relationships among Utterance Length, Syntactic Complexity, and Disfluencies in Preschool Children who Stutter

Sung, Soo Jin; Sim, Hyun Sub

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Commun Sci Disord. 2002;7(1): 102-129.

Soo Jin Sung^` , and Hyun Sub Sim^`

성수진(Soo Jin Sung)| 심현섭(Hyun Sub Sim)

ABSTRACT

Several recent theories have suggested that speech disfluencies are related in part to various linguistic aspect s. This study examined the relationship between utterance length and frequency of disfluencies and that between syntactic complexity and frequencies of disfluencies in children who stutter. Eight 3- to 5-year - old children who stutter (three girls and five boys) participated in a sentence imitation task in which stimuli were divided into two levels of utterance length and a sentence modeling task in which stimuli were divided into three levels of syntactic complexity. The result s indicated that overall disfluencies in sentence imitation tasks increased significantly as utterance length increased. In the same vein, overall disfluencies in sentence modeling tasks increased significantly as syntactic complexity increased. The result s are discussed in terms of Demands and Capacities Model.

Keywords: 비유창성 | 유창성장애아동 | 발화길이 | 통사적 복잡성