ORCID
Victoria Tumanova: 0000-0002-4216-683X
Dahye Choi: 0000-0002-2726-1118
Edward G. Conture: 0000-0001-8656-2036
Tedra A. Walden: 0000-0003-4917-1022
Document Type
Article
Date
Summer 6-2013
Keywords
stuttering, hearing, speech
Language
English
Disciplines
Communication Sciences and Disorders
Description/Abstract
Purpose—The purpose of this study was to assess the relation of behavioral inhibition to stuttering and speech/language output in preschool-age children who do (CWS) and do not stutter (CWNS).
Method—Participants were preschool-age (ages 36 to 68 months), including 26 CWS (22 males) and 28 CWNS (13 males). Participants’ behavioral inhibition (BI) was assessed by measuring the latency to their sixth spontaneous comment during conversation with an unfamiliar experimenter, using methodology developed by Kagan, Reznick, and Gibbons (1989). In addition to these measures of BI, each participant’s stuttered and non-stuttered disfluencies and mean length of utterance (in morphemes) were assessed.
Results—Among the more salient findings, it was found that (1) there was no significant difference in BI between preschool-age CWS and CWNS as a group, (2) when extremely high versus low inhibited children were selected, there were more CWS with higher BI and fewer CWS with lower BI when compared to their CWNS peers, and (3) more behaviorally inhibited CWS, when compared to less behaviorally inhibited CWS, exhibited more stuttering.
Conclusions—Findings are taken to suggest that one aspect of temperament (i.e., behavioral inhibition) is exhibited by some preschool-age CWS and that these children stutter more than CWS with lower behavioral inhibition. The present results seem to support continued study of the association between young children’s temperamental characteristics and stuttering, the diagnostic entity (i.e., CWS versus CWNS), as well as stuttering, the behavior (e.g., frequency of stuttered disfluencies).
Recommended Citation
Choi D., Conture, E., Walden, T., Lambert, W., & Tumanova, V. (2013). Behavioral inhibition and childhood stuttering. Journal of Fluency Disorders, 38, 171-183, doi: 10.1016/j.jfludis.2013.03.001
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
