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ABSTRACT
Evidence suggests young monolingual children who stutter (CWS) are more disfluent on function than content words, particularly when produced in the initial utterance position. The purpose of the present preliminary study was to investigate whether young bilingual CWS present with this same pattern. The narrative and conversational samples of four bilingual Spanish- and English-speaking CWS were analysed. All four bilingual participants produced significantly more stuttering on function words compared to content words, irrespective of their position in the utterance, in their Spanish narrative and conversational speech samples. Three of the four participants also demonstrated more stuttering on function compared to content words in their narrative speech samples in English, but only one participant produced more stuttering on function than content words in her English conversational sample. These preliminary findings are discussed relative to linguistic planning and language proficiency and their potential contribution to stuttered speech.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank our undergraduate research assistants, Blanca Esperanza, Cristina Rincon, Carmen Garcia, and Christi Prado who assisted with the transcription and data coding process. We would also like to thank Dr. Michael Mahometa for his assistance with the statistical analyses. Most of all, we would like to thank the bilingual children who stutter and their families who were willing to give their time to participate in this study and help us to further our knowledge of the underlying nature of stuttering.
Declaration of interest
The authors report no conflicts of interest.
Funding
We would like to acknowledge the Michael and Tami Lang Stuttering Institute endowment and the ASHA Multicultural Affairs grant awarded to the second author.