Disfluency characteristics of Omani Arabic-English bilingual speakers

ABSTRACT

This study examined the oral reading and conversational speech of eight bilinguals who stutter (BWS). The participants spoke Omani Arabic as the dominant and English as the less-dominant language. The samples were examined with particular reference to the production of overall disfluency, stuttering-like disfluencies (SLDs) and other-disfluencies (ODs) occurring at the syllable and word level. The results indicated no difference in the amount of overall disfluency or ODs between the two languages in either reading or conversation. A significantly higher amount of SLDs were found to occur in words during reading in Arabic compared to English, which was attributed to the linguistic complexity of formal Arabic. A higher amount of SLDs in syllables were found in English compared to Arabic during conversation, although no such difference was found at the word level. The results align with a small body of research suggesting equivalent amounts of stuttering between dominant and less-dominant languages during conversation. The finding of a higher amount of stuttering during reading in Arabic is suggestive of motor differences in the production of the two languages that differentially affect speech fluency.

KEYWORDS:

• Arabic
• bilingualism
• disfluency
• stuttering

Acknowledgments

The research reported here was conducted by the first author and submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Science degree at the University of Canterbury. The second author served as advisor. The authors would like to thank the bilingual participants. We also wish to thank the staff and administrators of Sultan Qaboos University Hospital, Muscat Sultanate of Oman for providing the recording and data collection environment.

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest.