Grammatical Function in Relation to Stuttering in Young Children

Abstract

Samples of the speech of 13 stutterers from two to six years of age were studied to determine to what extent the distribution of stutterings was related to the grammatical functions of words. The findings were markedly different from those reported on older stutterers. For the most part the stutterings were randomly distributed with respect to the grammatical factor, but there was a tendency for stuttering to occur unusually often on pronouns and conjunctions and less often, in relation to chance expectation, on nouns and interjections. The excessive stuttering on pronouns and conjunctions appeared to be largely the effect of the high frequency of stuttering on the first word of the sentence. It was concluded that a true grammatical factor does not exist in the initial phase of stuttering, and probably emerges only with the emergence of difficult words.