Hesitation Phenomena in the Spontaneous Speech of Normal and Articulatory-Defective Children

The utterances of 40 children aged five to six and equally distributed as to age, sex, and group — normal or articulatory-defective - were recorded unobtrusively. Samples of each recording were analyzed for eight categories of hesitation phenomena. Retest recordings were made and analyzed for 16 of the subjects to assess temporal reliability of the hesitation phenomena. The results showed that, like adults, the children used ah phenomena and repetitions/stutters significantly more often than other hesitation phenomena. Articulatory-defectives, by contrast, used more non-ah phenomena. Articulatory-defective males exhibited significantly more hesitation phenomena generally than the other groups. Hesitation phenomena decreased with age for the males in the study but increased for females.