It's About Time: Parent-Child Turn-Taking in Early Stuttering

Abstract

Many professional and self-help organizations (e.g. ASHA and SFA) present advice to lengthen the time between speaking turns in early parent-child interactions in an effort to assist the child who stutters (CWS). However, only a very limited amount of research conducted using small numbers of children supports the suggestion that structured turn-taking may have the ability to reduce the number of disfluencies produced by the child who stutters. In addition, the longitudinal effect of increasing the length between speaking turns has yet to be analyzed; Hence, we do not know whether the suggestion to increase the time between speaking turns has any effect on the persistence or recovery from stuttering. Our study aims to look at this advice at stuttering onset in a longitudinal study by analyzing mother-child play interactions in 80 files containing children and their mothers (now archived at FluencyBank) for whom stuttering outcomes are known.