Phonetic complexity and stuttering in Turkish-speaking children who stutter

ABSTRACT

The relationship between stuttering and phonetic complexity for words spoken by Turkish children who stutter was investigated. The research questions were: (1) Do Turkish-speaking children stutter more on unbound content words than on unbound function words? (2) Do Turkish-speaking children stutter more on words with higher phonetic complexity scores? Twenty-one monolingual children aged 6–11 years who had a clinical diagnosis of stuttering participated. Speech samples were transcribed and lexical categories determined. Phonetic complexity was assessed by an adaptation of Index of Phonetic Complexity (IPC) for Turkish. Results revealed that the mean rank of unbound content words differed significantly from the mean rank of unbound function words and that stuttering frequency for unbound content words was significantly higher than for unbound function words.

KEYWORDS:

• Stuttering
• Turkish
• phonetic complexity
• lexical category

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Prof. Dr. Özgür Aydın, for his valuable comments and our students (Cansu Pancar, Halime Arığtekin, Melike Topal, Yunus Alperen Öncel) for their help collecting the data.

Declaration of interest statement

The authors report no conflict of interest

Notes

¹ In the present study abbreviations below are used:

AWS: adults who stutter

C: content word

C_unbound: unbound content word

CM: content morpheme

CWS: children who stutter

F: function word

F_unbound: unbound function word

FM: function morpheme

IPC: index of phonetic complexity

PW: prosodic word.

² On the other hand, diphthongs occur in some words because of <ğ>, semi vowel/y/and some other borrowed words for Turkish.

³ For more similar examples see Ergenç and Bekar-Uzun (2017, p. 273).

⁴ Turkish word park ‘park’ is scored in all categories as an example.