Researchers in the area of stuttering have attempted to delineate factors that exacerbate stuttering behaviors and those that facilitate fluency. Young children who stutter, parents of children who stutter, and speech-language pathologists, can benefit from this information because it a) should lead to the development of more efficacious intervention programs for these children, and b) should permit more effective counseling for parents, teachers, and children exhibiting signs of stuttering. Although progress has been made in understanding stuttering and its treatment, much remains unknown. Some studies have addressed the connection between language development and use, and the onset and maintenance of stuttering. For example, periods of """"""""normal disfluency"""""""" have been studied for their tendency to occur during spurts of early language learning and """"""""communicative responsibility"""""""" has been hypothesized as a demand that could increase the likelihood of stuttering. Because language use and communication efforts represent the typical milieu in which stuttering occurs, it is logical to pursue this connection. That is, do the demands placed on a child, already diagnosed as a stutterer, to be an effective communicator tend to be associated with instances of stuttering? A great deal is known about the acquisition of basic conversational competencies in young children and ongoing ;development of these skills during the school years. However, it is not known how trying to maintain fluency may affect stutterers' abilities to exhibit a variety of conversation skills. The goal of the study is to analyze the conversational contributions of a group of school-age stutterers and their normally-fluent matches in terms of the conversation acts and discourse functions they serve. Three different conversation situations differing in terms of the child's familiarity with the partner, number of partners, and topic will be used. The results will allow a comparison of the two groups' conversation competencies. Further, studying the relationships between the children's disfluencies (e.g. utterance function, conversation role played by the co-conversationalist) and discourse structure should permit predictions of the types of conversation demands that increase the likelihood of instances of stuttering and which do not. If informative, these data will be used to develop an intervention program with treatment focusing on a hierarchy of conversational contexts with regard to communicative responsibility.
| Weiss, Amy L (2002) Recasts in parents' language to their school-age children who stutter: a preliminary study. J Fluency Disord 27:243-64; quiz 265-6, III |
