Use of Monolingual English Guidelines to Assess Stuttering in Bilingual Speakers:: A Systematic Review

Speech-language pathologists can identify stuttering in multiple languages,even if they do not speak the language. However, due to differences in languagedevelopment, multilingual speakers have been documented with higherlevels of typical disfluencies in their speech than monolingual speakers. Thesehigher levels of disfluency put multilingual speakers at greater risk of misdiagnosis as individuals who stutter, due to poor understanding of the nature of the manifestation of stuttering in two or more languages and reliance on monolingual-English diagnostic criteria. The purpose of the present systematic review is to explore how stuttering is identified in multilingual speakers who are described as participants who stutter, and whether monolingual English-speaking guidelines were the most commonly used reference for determining the presence of stuttering.