Stuttering Frequency in Relation to Lexical Diversity, Syntactic Complexity, and Utterance Length

Children’s frequency of stuttering can be affected by utterance length, syntactic complexity, and lexical content of language. Using a unique small-scale within-subjects design, this study explored whether language samples that contain more stuttering have (a) longer, (b) syntactically more complex, and (c) lexically more diverse utterances than samples that contain less stuttering. Children who stutter, ages 2 years 1 month to 4 years 11 months, produced 10 monthly language samples. For each child, samples were divided into the first five (early) and the last five (later). Utterance length, syntactic complexity, and lexical diversity analyses were performed on samples that contained the most and least stuttering for early and later samples. For the later samples but not the early ones, samples with the most stuttering contained longer mean lengths of utterance, more diverse vocabulary overall, and greater syntactic complexity than samples with the least stuttering. Contributions of language growth, time, and specific linguistic factors are discussed.