Relation of Stuttering Loci to Language Development in Early Childhood

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the loci of stuttering is related to relative level of language development. Participants were 30 pre-school age boys who stutter who produced an average of 83 sentences during a parent-child conversation. Results indicated that children who stutter (CWS) with lower MLU were relatively more likely to stutter on sentence-initial function words, while CWS with high MLU were relatively more likely to stutter on function words at other positions. Results are taken to suggest that CWS's level of language development influences the loci of their conversational stutterings.