Disfluency In Childhood

The preschool period (i.e. 2 to 6 years of age) is of great concern in studying disfluency patterns. These periods are both important in regards to disfluency (Ram & Savithri, 2007), and also, the onset of stuttering as has been observed to be most frequent during this period of development (Johnson, 1959 cited in Tumanova, Conture, Lambert, & Walden, 2014). Since the relationship between normally disfluent speech and early stuttering continues to be of theoretical interest (Tumanova, 2016; Yairi, 1981), researchers view the establishment of “normal expectations of disfluency” (Wexler & Mysak, 1982 cited in Ram & Savithri, 2007) for various preschool age groups as theoretically and diagnostically important (Tomanova, et al., 2014). We think

As mentioned by Starkweather (1987) and Rose (2017), these disfluencies help children gain the time that they need for the speech - planning process. This, however, cannot be regarded as something unexpected and surprising: their disfluency, in this respect, can be well interpreted as sign of their diligent attempt to produce the most impeccable utterance possible, impressing everyone. These children are, in the real sense of the word, busy dealing, getting involved and struggling with rapid speech development (Kowal, O’Connell, & Sabin, 1975). Nevertheless, the result which was certainly out of expectation was their relative fluency in the explanation category: this was predicted and surmised beforehand to require noticeable thinking and reflection, resulting in a large number of disfluencies such as silent pauses as well as pause fillers. The recordings, in contrast, revealed their dexterity, in this regard, which can well be recommended to be the subject of further inquiry and

Disfluencies of various types, comprising silences, breaks, fillers, or repetitions are decidedly and admittedly used for a whole myriad of reasons, including reformulation, replacement, and planning. Irrespective of the type and the function of the disfluency, the fact of tremendous value is that children at 4, 5, or 6, are quite skillful and dexterous at utilizing language in the best way possible.
The results of this study provide primitive normative values of disfluencies in 4-6 year old Iranian Farsi speaking children. The study thus provides a base for determining normative disfluency patterns in a language other than English (Ram & Savithri, 2007) and thus shed light on the importance of normative data specific to each language (Leclercq, Suaire, & Moyse, 2017).

References
Belz, M., Sauer, S., Lüdeling, A. & Mooshammer, C. (2017). Fluently disfluent? Pauses and Repairs of Advanced Learners and Native Speakers of German. International Journal of Learner Corpus Research, 3(2). Special Issue: Segmental, Prosodic and Fluency Features in Phonetic Learner