Effects of the syntactic complexity on the amount of speech dysfluency of stuttering and nonstuttering Persian-speaker children in conversational speech

Many researches have dealt with the relationship between stuttering and different linguistic factors. This study investigates the effect of syntactic complexity on the amount of speech dysfluency in stuttering Persian-speaking children, and comparing them with the non-stuttering ones. The obtained results can pave the way to obtain a better knowledge of the nature of stuttering, as well as finding more suitable ways in the process of its treatment.

The participants were 10 stuttering and 10 non-stuttering Persian-speaking and monolingual children in the age range of 4-6 which were matched by age and gender. First 30 minutes sample of child's spontaneous speech was provided and then utterances of each child studied for the amount of dysfluency and syntactic complexity.

In both groups of stuttering and non-stuttering children, there was a significant difference for the amount of dysfluency between simple and complex sentences.

The results of this study show that by increase of syntactic complexity at the spontaneous speech level, stuttering and non-stuttering children had more dysfluency amount. Also, by increase of syntactic complexity, stuttering children had more dysfluency amount than non-stuttering children.