Speech Disfluencies in Children with Down Syndrome

Publication date: Available online 8 November 2017
Source:Journal of Communication Disorders
Author(s): Kurt Eggers, Sabine Van Eerdenbrugh
PurposeSpeech and language development in individuals with Down syndrome is often delayed and/or disordered and speech disfluencies appear to be more common. These disfluencies have been labeled over time as stuttering, cluttering or both.Findingswere usually generated from studies with adults or a mixed age group, quite often using different methodologies, making it difficult to compare findings. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to analyze and describe the speech disfluencies of a group, only consisting of children with Down Syndrome between 3 and 13 years of age.MethodParticipants consisted of 26 Dutch-speaking children with DS. Spontaneous speech samples were collected and 50 utterances were analyzed for each child. Types of disfluencies were identified and classified into stuttering-like (SLD) and other disfluencies (OD). The criterion of three or more SLD per 100 syllables (cf. Ambrose & Yairi, 1999) was used to identify stuttering. Additional parameters such as mean articulation rate (MAR), ratio of disfluencies, and telescoping (cf. Coppens-Hofman et al., 2013) were used to identify cluttering and to differentiate between stuttering and cluttering.Results & ConclusionApproximately 30 percent of children with DS between 3 and 13 years of age in this study stutter, which is much higher than the prevalence in normally developing children. Moreover, this study showed that the speech of children with DS has a different distribution of types of disfluencies than the speech of normally developing children. Although different cluttering-like characteristics were found in the speech of young children with DS, none of them could be identified as cluttering or cluttering-stuttering.



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