Characteristics of Final Part-Word Repetitions

In an earlier paper, we have described final part-word repetitions in the conversational speech of two school-age boys of normal intelligence with no known neurological lesions. In this paper we explore in more detail the phonetic and linguistic characteristics of the speech of the boys. The repeated word fragments were more likely to be preceded by a pause than followed by one. The word immediately following the fragment tended to have a higher word frequency score than other surrounding words. Utterances containing the disfluencies typically contained a greater number of syllables than those that did not; however, there was no reliable difference between fluent and disfluent utterances in terms of their grammatical complexity.