Stuttering Analysis

Stuttering is found to occur across cultures, languages and races; it affects both monolingual and bilingual speakers (Guitar, 2013). According to Gordon (2005), Mandarin is the most widely spoken language in the world, with more than one billion speakers worldwide. In the United States, over 60 million people speak a language other than English (Ryan, 2013), among which Mandarin is the second most common spoken language (about 2.9 million). Statistics shows that increasingly more people have started to speak Mandarin in the United States over the past three decades (345.3% change) (Ryan, 2013). If stuttering exists in all ethnic groups and languages, it can be assumed that there are a large amount of Mandarin speaking speakers who stutter,

The researchers used many standardized assessment tests to evaluate the speech data, which objectively measured the subject’s stutters. Furthermore, they analyzed the subject’s utterances using Terminable Units (T-Units) and Index of Phonetic Complexity (IPC), which provided information regarding the relationship between stuttering and the linguistic characteristics of two languages. In spite of these strengths, the study also had its limitations. Even though the researchers concluded that similarities and differences both existed in an individual’s stuttering pattern, they failed to point out the clinical implications the study provided. Also, the study only focused on the speech characteristics, but not the individual’s affective and cognitive aspects of stuttering, which failed to address the holistic picture of

(2015) suggested that there was a link between the lexical tone and the stuttering loci in Mandarin, which was similar to the stress effect found in English and German. Stress effect, according to Chou et al. (2015), means that stuttering is more likely to occur in stressed syllables rather than unstressed syllables. In order to test this, the researchers recruited 20 children who stutter and analyzed their frequency and types of stutters, and the lexical tone associated with them. All the children were administered the standardized assessments in the research, including the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) and the Assessment for Language Disorders for Preschool-Age Children. Interviews were also conducted between parents and SLPs to obtain information regarding the child’s developmental, medical, and stuttering history. Last but not least, the conversational speech sample was collected from each child. The results of the study were that stuttering events were more likely to occur in trisyllabic tone combinations with a conflicting tone context. Also, stuttering occurred more frequently in Tone 3 and Tone 4 syllables rather than Tone 1 or Tone 2