Language task demands and disfluencies on nonstuttering children

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between task demands and disfluency production in twelve nonstuttering male subjects age 5 years to 5 years, 11 months during Sentence Imitation, Sentence Modeling, and Storytelling tasks. Subjects were required to repeat sentences, model syntactic constructions presented by the experimenter, and produce narratives from picture stimuli. Statistically significant differences in disfluency production (p < 0.05) were reported between the Sentence Imitation and Sentence Modeling Tasks, Sentence Imitation and Storytelling Tasks; but not between the Sentence Modeling and Storytelling Tasks. Descriptive analysis of the narrative data indicated that all of the Highly Disfluent subjects produced narratives of complexity Level III or above; however, only 50% of the Highly Fluent subjects produced narratives at or above this complexity level. These results indicated that significant differences in the frequency of disfluencies produced existed only between the Sentence Imitation and Sentence Modeling Tasks and the Sentence Imitation and Storytelling Tasks. Furthermore, descriptive analysis of the narrative data suggested a weak relationship between the level of narrative complexity and disfluency production. From these results, the author concluded that the cognitive-linguistic demands of a task may affect disfluency production of nonstuttering 5-year-old children. Within narratives, the relationship between disfluency production and complexity appears to be related to the subjects' attempts to link together the elements of the story in a single cohesive unit.