The Rules of Early Stuttering

Abstract

Brief samples of the speech of six stuttering children, aged three to six years, are analyzed on the basis of a conceptual model of stuttering as tension and fragmentation in speech. The hypothesis is advanced that while the older stutterer tends to fragment words, the early phase of stuttering is characterized chiefly by fragmentation of whole syntactic structures such as sentences, coordinate and subordinate clauses, verb phrases, noun phrases, and prepositional phrases. This is suggested by the predominance of repetitions of words and other large fragments, by their occurrence at the beginnings of syntactic structures, and by their absence from the ends of such structures. The young stutterer’s frequent tendency to stutter on pronouns and conjunctions is related to the model, and the prediction is made that the loci of early stuttering will not prove to be influenced directly by word-bound factors such as initial sound, word length, or word frequency.