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.
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
Cunbound: unbound content word
CM: content morpheme
CWS: children who stutter
F: function word
Funbound: 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 (Citation2017, p. 273).
4 Turkish word park ‘park’ is scored in all categories as an example.