CHILDREN’S EXPRESSIVE LANGUAGE GROWTH


MAY SIGNAL BETTER POTENTIAL FOR RECOVERY FROM EARLY STUTTERING by Dr. K.A. Leech, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill


Since approximately 80% of children diagnosed with stuttering appear to recover relatively soon after onset, one of the biggest challenges in stuttering research is to predict which children will go on to have persistent fluency problems, and which will spontaneously recover within a few years.


In previous research, particularly work done at Purdue by Christine Weber and colleagues, language and related abilities (e.g., phonological awareness, brain responses to language stimuli) have been shown to differentiate children who stutter (CWS) from children who do not stutter. However, many of these findings do not rely upon commonly obtained clinical data and typically use information taken only from the child’s first visit for diagnosis and recommendations.


In this study, we examined whether growth in productive language performance may better predict the probability of recovery compared to static profiles taken from a single time point. To carry out the work, the team at Purdue University (Christine Weber and colleague Barbara Brown) combined forces with Kathryn Leech, a specialist in growth modeling of language data, and Nan Bernstein Ratner, a fluency researcher with expertise in computational analysis of child language samples, at the University of Maryland.


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