Original Article
Child and mother variables in the development of stuttering among high-risk children: A longitudinal study

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Abstract

In this prospective study, 26 of the 93 preschool children with a parental history of stuttering who began to stutter were compared at preonset and 1 year later with those of a matched group of 26 children who continued to be seen as nonstutterers. These two groups of at-risk children were compared in terms of the development of their articulatory and language skills and in terms of the communicative style and speaking behaviors of their mothers. At preonset, the children who started to stutter demonstrated a faster articulatory rate than those who remained fluent. One year later, however, this difference was no longer statistically significant. The two groups of children did not differ in their linguistic skills at either of these time periods. Moreover, the communicative style and speaking behaviors of the mothers of the children who later began to stutter did not differ from that of the mothers of children who did not either prior to or after the onset of stuttering. This suggests that these variables did not contribute to the onset of stuttering or to its course.

Introduction

This study is one part of a longitudinal study in which 93 preschool children, born in families with a stuttering father and/or mother, were observed for several years. Offspring of this kind are especially at risk for developing stuttering Kay 1964, Kidd, Heimbuch, & Records 1981, Ambrose et al. 1993. The children studied were between 2 and 5 years of age (M = 39 months, SD = 9.0) when the investigation began. At that time, their speech was regarded by their parents and the experimenters as normally fluent. As previously reported, 26 (28%) of the 93 participants began to stutter in the course of the first 2 years of this research project Kloth, et al. 1995a, Kloth, et al. 1995b. During this 2-year period, the remaining 67 children continued to speak in a normally fluent fashion.

While our earlier reports presented data on early prediction of stuttering, this study follows the children and their mothers over a period of 1 year in order to see if the development of the articulatory and language skills of the children under study and the communicative and speaking behaviors of their mothers discriminated between the children who initially were fluent speakers but who later began to stutter and those who continued to speak fluently.

Overall, during preschool years, the speech and language skills of children developed rapidly (Peters & Guitar, 1991), and it is in this period that stuttering usually begins (Bloodstein, 1995). In addition, there is evidence that children who stutter score more poorly than their nonstuttering peers in regard to the age at which their first word and sentence are produced, the level of receptive vocabulary, mean length of utterance, and expressive and receptive syntax Andrews & Harris 1964, Murray & Reed 1977, Kline & Starkweather 1979, Wall 1980, Byrd & Cooper 1989, Ryan 1992. Moreover, comparative studies have demonstrated that children who stutter have slower speech movements Meyers & Freeman 1985a, Adams 1987 and show a higher incidence of articulation disorders than nonstutterers do Andrews & Harris 1964, Williams & Silverman 1968, Meyers & Freeman 1985a, Yaruss, LaSalle, & Conture 1995. However, as previously reported (Kloth et al. 1995a), we did not found any differences in this respect between children who would later stutter and those who would continue to speak fluently. Only articulation rate appeared to be significantly related to the onset of stuttering. Unexpectedly, the preonset articulation rate of the children at risk who later began to stutter was significantly faster than that of the children who continued to be fluent (Kloth et al., 1995a).

The aforementioned discrepancy between our findings and those of comparative studies in which children who stutter were found to speak at a slower rate and to use simpler linguistic structures than nonstutterers, led us to hypothesize that once our preschoolers began to stutter, their rate of speech and their rate of language development would be damped. If this is the case, it would suggest that the slower speech movement and the retardation in measured language development is a result of stuttering rather than evidence for limited speech–motor and/or language capacity.

In a similar vein, this study explored whether or not mothers of children who developed stuttering show specific changes in their communicative and speaking behavior which are not present among mothers whose children continue to speak fluently. Comparative parent–child interaction studies have indicated that mother of stutterers make more use of demands, requests, and commands (Langlois, Hanrahan, & Inouye, 1986) and talk faster than mothers of nonstutterers (Meyers & Freeman, 1985b). However, our preonset findings indicated that mothers of children who later began to stutter did not differ with respect to communicative behavior and speaking rate from the mothers of those children who continued to speak fluently (Kloth et al., 1995b). If a difference between the mothers only appears after the onset of stuttering, it might be because their children’s stuttering behavior altered their interactional patterns.

The current report presents updated longitudinal data on the 26 children who began to stutter and 26 who did not during the course of this study. The normally speaking children were selected from the remaining 67 children who continued to speak in a normally fluent fashion to match the 26 children who began to stutter in terms of sex and age. The object of this investigation was to assess the articulatory and linguistic skills of the children and the communicative and speaking behaviors of the mothers at the start of the study when all the 52 children were fluent speakers and 1 year later when 26 children were classified as stutterers.

Section snippets

Subjects

Fifty two of the 93 preschool children who were the subjects of the original investigation were the subjects in the present study. These children had a stuttering father and/or mother, and all demonstrated normal development as reported by both their pediatrician and their parents. At the beginning of the study, none of the participating children were reported by their parents as stuttering, and no stuttering forms of speech disruptions were observed by the experimenters. Moreover, each of the

Language Skills

For each subject, age-equivalent scores for receptive language development were obtained from the Reynell and the PPVT test procedures and for expressive language development from the Reynell. In addition, each child’s mean length of utterance (MLU) transcribed during the 10-min spontaneous speech periods was used as a measure of their expressive language skill. MLU was determined by dividing the total number of nonrepeated words spoken by the child by the number of utterances. One-word

Child Variables

In Table 1 the means and the standard deviations of the articulatory and linguistic skill measures are presented for the stuttering and nonstuttering children at initial testing and at the follow-up test session 1 year later.

Table 1 shows that for all the children under study the articulation rate became faster and their receptive and expressive skills increased, 1 year after initial testing. In order to test for statistically significant differences between the subject groups, over time and

Discussion

Fifty-two children with a parental history of stuttering who were viewed as nonstutterers at the start of the study participated as subjects. Data from these at-risk children resulted from an initial test session when all the children were fluent and a follow-up session 1 year later. Through systematic periodic observation, 26 children who remained fluent and 26 children who developed stuttering were prospectively identified.

One question explored by this study was whether or not the children

Acknowledgements

This research has been supported by a grant from the Dutch Organization of Scientific Research (NWO-Psychon No. 560-268-038).

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