The effect of syntactic complexity upon the speech fluency of adolescents and adults who stutter

Past research has shown that syntactic complexity affects stuttering frequency in young children. This study examined whether syntactic complexity continues to do so during adolescence and adulthood. Twelve persons who stutter ( M age=23 years) produced self-generated sentences within a structured conversational task and prepared sentences within a reaction time task. Analysis of length-matched stuttered and fluent conversational utterances showed no difference in the number of clauses or syntactic constituents per utterance. Similarly, analysis of prepared sentences showed no difference in disfluency rates across the four levels of syntactic complexity associated with the task. Stuttering frequency was significantly less during prepared sentences than it was during length-matched conversational utterances. During the prepared sentence task, speakers articulated syntactically complex sentences more rapidly than syntactically simple sentences. Results suggest that adolescent and adults who stutter can produce various grammatical sentence types with comparable fluency, and do so without employing rate-based compensatory strategies. Educational Objectives: (1) Readers will be able to explain the effects of syntactic structure and speaking task upon the speech fluency and articulation rate of adolescents and adults who stutter. (2) Readers will describe some possible directions for future research into syntax–fluency relationships.