Phonetic Context in Disfluencies of Children with Stuttering

Abstract

An extensive research data has been accumulated since decades on the phonetic determinants of stuttering. However, most of the work has focused on adults rather than children, using oral reading than spontaneous speech.The current study investigated the phonetic context in children with stuttering (CWS). 10 monolingual children with stuttering in the age range of 6-8 years exposed to only Kannada language were considered for the study. Analysis of stuttering was made with respect to place and manner of articulation of consonants and vowels.The results indicated that children with stuttering were more disfluent on consonants than vowels in general. There was also a significant difference between the median percentage scores of long and short vowels. The rank order of the phonetic contexts of disfluency with respect to place and manner of articulation of consonants included /T/, /d/, /r/, /v/, /p/, /j/, /g/, /D/, /sh/, /c/, /s/, /y/, /k/, /l/, /n/, /t/, /m/, /b/ and /h/. Among the long vowels, the rank order included /oo/ & /uu/, /ee/, /aa/ and /ii/, and on the short vowels similar trend was present except /u/.The results suggest that plosives, fricatives and high back vowels are frequently disfluent compared to other phonemes. Voiced and voiceless sound classification seems to have little effect on the formulation of the general ranking of difficulty of stuttering in children. CWS did not exhibit a consistent pattern for the presence of disfluencies with regard to the distribution of phonetic loci of instances. The analysis showed that although a ranking of sounds with difficulty is suggested, the individual variations are far more pronounced than the group tendency toward formulation of such ranking. The rate of phonetic loci of disfluency appears to be a dynamic phenomenon which appears to be varying across CWS. The findings support the fact that the variability of stuttering is one of the hallmarks of developmental stuttering. Further, the problem of stuttering should be viewed in association with linguistic and physiological substrata of language/speech production.