Lexical category influences in Persian children who stutter

Abstract

This article explores the effect that words from different lexical categories have on disfluency in 12 Persian children, ten boys and two girls, who stutter. They were aged 7 years 5 months to 10 years 6 months. Words from the participants’ narrative and reading samples (sub-tests of the Reading and Dyslexia Test validated for Persian school-aged children) were categorized as content, function, or content–function, and stuttering-like disfluencies were coded in each speech sample. Content and content–function words were significantly more likely to show stuttering-like disfluencies than function words. The distribution of symptom types over content and content–function words was similar, and differed from the distribution seen in function words. The symptom type analysis also supported the view that whole-word repetitions should not be grouped with other stuttering-like disfluencies.

• Content word
• disfluency
• EXPLAN theory
• function word
• Persian
• school-aged children
• stuttering

Acknowledgements

We thank Dr Reza Nilipour and Miss Maryam Mokhlessin, University of Social Welfare and Social Sciences, Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran; Julie D. Anderson, Department of Speech and Hearing Science, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN; Dr Hamid Karimi, Department of Speech and Language Pathology, School of Rehabilitation Sciences, Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, Isfahan, Islamic Republic of Iran; Mr Mehdi Bakhtiar, Zahedan University of Medical Sciences, Zahedan, Islamic Republic of Iran; and Mr Majid Uryadi Zanjani, Department of Speech and Language Pathology, Shiraz University of Medical Sciences, Shiraz, Iran for scientific advice and help with obtaining research articles. Special thanks are due to the clinicians in Shiraz who helped us perform this research. We thank Miss Hamideh Tamannadar for providing a relaxing environment for the participants of this research, and K. Shashok for improving the use of English in the article.

Notice of Correction

Changes have been made to this article since its original online publication date of 13 August, 2013.