The Link Between Syntactic Complexity and Stuttering-Like Disfluencies in French Speaking Adults.
Alice Le Dévic, Sascha Diwersy, Ivana Didirková
PMID 41784563WHAT IT FOUND
In 12 French adults who stutter, disfluencies rose with longer and more complex sentences, but the link was weak.
Sentence length tracked disfluencies best. This did not test treatment.
Key findings
01Adults who stutter produced significantly more total disfluencies and stuttering-like disfluencies than fluent controls.
02In adults who stutter, disfluency counts increased significantly with utterance length and syntactic complexity, but the correlations were weak to very weak.
03In adults who stutter, mean length of utterance explained disfluency counts significantly better than the two syntactic complexity indices.
STILL TO COME
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What it does not show
Only 24 adults took part, including 12 adults who stutter, so the findings may not generalise to all adults who stutter. The stuttering severity groups were uneven, with only 2 severe stutterers, which may have reduced sensitivity to severity differences. The task asked for one sentence per image, which may produce fewer disfluencies than natural conversation. The sentences tested only declarative structures with coordination or subordination, not negation, questions, or passive voice. The relationship between syntactic complexity and disfluency was weak to very weak, and the study did not test any treatment.
Declared interests
The study was supported by Agence Nationale de la Recherche grant ANR-18-CE36-0008. The authors declare no competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have influenced the work.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that simplifying adult speech reduces stuttering. The study observed disfluencies during a controlled image-description task and did not test any therapy. The association between syntactic complexity and disfluencies was weak.
Summarised by AI from the full paper, without a clinician reviewing it. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed →