LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 13:5 May 2013
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         S. M. Ravichandran, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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Phonetic Context in Disfluencies of Children with Stuttering

Mrs. Sangeetha Mahesh, M.Sc. (Speech & Hearing)
Dr. Y.V. Geetha, Ph.D. (Speech & Hearing)

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.

Key words: Phonetic context, children with stuttering, Monolinguals, Consonants, Vowels

Stuttering – A Speech Motor Control Deficit

Stuttering is reported to be a speech disorder involving a motor control deficit, and not a language disorder (Bloodstein, 2006). In describing the developmental stuttering, Olander, Smith and Zelaznik (2010) explained that "during the disfluencies that characterize stuttering, the speech motor system fails to generate and/or send the motor commands to muscles that are necessary for fluent speech to continue". Similarly, as argued by Packman, Code, and Onslow (2007) developmental stuttering is a problem in syllable initiation in which the child is unable to move forward in speech because the speech planning system is compromised. Further, they explained that this difficulty is first noticed when the child attempts to produce multisyllabic utterances requiring complex sequential movements and varied linguistic stress patterns across syllables to communicate the intended meaning. According to Packman et al (2007) children do not stutter when babbling or producing first words because these additional speech motor demands are not yet present.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Mrs. Sangeetha Mahesh, M.Sc. (Speech & Hearing)
Clinical Lecturer
Department of Clinical Services
All India Institute of Speech and Hearing
Manasagangothri, Naimisham Campus
Mysore- 570006
Karnataka
India
smahesh64@gmail.com

Dr. Y.V. Geetha, Ph. D. (Speech & Hearing)
Professor of Speech Sciences
Department of Speech Language Sciences
All India Institute of Speech and Hearing
Manasagangothri, Naimisham Campus
Mysore- 570 006
Karnataka
India
geethayelimeli@gmail.com
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