Stuttering or not? Analysis of language exposure effects on fluency assessment

Abstract

Language exposure is hypothesized to impact bilingual speakers’ levels of typical and stuttering-like disfluency. The current study examined the relationship between English language exposure before school age and bilingual children’s speech fluency during an English task. The sample included 33 Spanish-English bilingual children from the English-MiamiBiling corpus at CHILDES. Participants were asked to narrate Mayer’s (1969) wordless picture book, Frog, Where Are You? Children who spoke only Spanish in the home were referred to as “MonoSpanHome” while children who spoke English and Spanish at home were referred to as “BilingHome.” It was hypothesized that children in the “MonoSpanHome” group would be more disfluent than their “BilingHome” peers. It was found that the “MonoSpanHome” participants had an increased number of typical disfluencies than their “BilingHome” counterparts. However, the number of stuttering-like disfluencies and total overall disfluency was similar between the two groups.