Language sample analysis of conversation samples from school-age children who stutter: The role of syntactic factors in stuttering.
Jayanthi Sasisekaran, Shriya Basu
PMID 37699262WHAT IT FOUND
School-age children who stutter used more complex sentence structures in shorter conversation samples than fluent peers.
Higher syntactic complexity was associated with more stuttering. This suggests clinicians should assess language ability with caution, as stuttering itself may limit the sample size and complexity observed.
Key findings
01Children who stutter produced conversation samples with significantly fewer utterances than fluent peers, yet used more complex noun phrases and showed a trend toward more complex verb phrases.
02Sentences with higher syntactic complexity (as measured by DSS scores) contained significantly more stuttering and typical disfluencies than sentences with lower complexity.
03Children who stutter showed a comparable rate of phrase repetitions and revisions, whereas fluent peers produced significantly more revisions than repetitions, suggesting differences in linguistic planning resources.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The conversation samples from children who stutter were significantly shorter than those from fluent peers, which may have biased the measurement of syntactic variety. The study did not control for the specific topics of conversation, which may have varied in linguistic demand. The findings are correlational; the study cannot determine if syntactic complexity causes stuttering or if stuttering leads to the use of complex structures. The sample size was moderate (46 participants), limiting the generalizability to all school-age children who stutter.
Declared interests
The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that children who stutter have a syntactic language disorder based on lower IPsyn scores. The study shows that these scores are heavily influenced by the smaller number of utterances produced in the conversation samples, and that the CWS actually used more complex noun phrases per utterance than their fluent peers.