Speech and Language Development and Language Abilities of Stuttering Male Children with Early Onset

Abstract

Speech and language developoment and language abilities of three-year-old stuttering children with early onset were examined. Information about language development was gained through a questionnaire and interview with each mother and though administraion of the ‘Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities-Japanese Version’. The subjects were 16 male children who had begun to stutter at the age of 2 but who had no other speech or language disorders. The severity of stuttering of the subjects was rated from 1 to 7 according to ‘scale for rating severity of stuttering’, based on a half-hour observation by three speech and language pathologists. In comparisons against a normal group, the subjects showed normal speech and language development regarding the emergence of first words and two-word sentences. However, the subjects divided into two groups: one with good speech and language development and one with inferior speech and language development. The latter consisted of 7 subjects, which seemed to be a fairly high ratio. Although raw scores on the 10 subtests of the ITPA showed no significant differences between the subject group and the normal group, lower trends emerged for ‘Grammatic Closure’ and ‘Auditory Sequential Memory’ of the ‘Automatic Level’, which deal with the auditory vocal channel, and for ‘Verbal Expression’ of the ‘Representational Level’, which also deals with the auditory vocal channel, when the scaled scores of the 10 subtests and intra-individual differences on the ITPA were analyzed. PLQ and scaled scores for ‘Auditory Reception’ of the ‘Representational Level’ showed a significant difference between the good speech and language development group and the inferior group. More subjects and control groups should be studied to confirm the results of this study. © 1996, The Japan Society of Logopedics and Phoniatrics. All rights reserved.