Speech Disfluency in School-Age Children’s Conversational and Narrative Discourse

Purpose This study was designed to (a) compare the speech fluency of school-age children who do and do not stutter (CWS and CWNS, respectively) within 2 standard diagnostic speaking contexts (conversation and narration) while also controlling for speaking topic, and (b) examine the extent to which children’s performance on such discourse tasks is affected by age. Method Participants were 44 school-age children who were divided evenly into four groups, depending on their age (older, younger) and fluency status (CWS, CWNS). Children conversed with an examiner about a series of pictures and then told a story about the same pictures. Results School-age CWS produced more instances of atypical (stuttering-like) disfluencies in the narrative context than in the conversational context. Younger school-age children produced more instances of typical (nonstuttering-like) disfluencies in the conversational sample than did older school-age children. Age did not affect the frequency of children’s stuttering-like disflu...