Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

12-1984

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major Professor

Harlod L. Luper

Committee Members

Ellen I. Hamby, Charles H. Hargis, Harold A. Peterson

Abstract

This study was designed to investigate differences in the number of disfluencies of three-, five-, and seven-year-old nonstuttering children as syntactic complexity was varied in a sentence imitation and a sentence modeling task. Thirty-six nonstuttering children, twelve from each age group, served as subjects for the study.

The sentence imitation task stimuli consisted of thirty sentences representing three different syntactic constructions: (1) simple affirmative declarative with copula + ing, (2) future, and (3) passive. The sentence modeling task stimuli consisted of thirty sentence stimulation pictures representing the same three syntactic constructions.

The subjects were required to repeat the stimulus sentences from the sentence imitation stimuli. For the sentence modeling task the subjects were shown a picture frame in which two pictorial examples of a syntactic construction were represented. The examiner produced a sentence from one picture represented on the plate and the subjects were required to model that syntactic construction for the second picture represented on the plate. The subjects' responses were tape recorded and the number of disfluencies was counted for each subject for each stimulus sentence. Disfluencies were identified by using a modification of Johnson's (1961) categories of disfluencies as described by Williams, Silverman, and Kools (1968).

The results of the present study were as follows:

1. There was a significant difference in the number of disfluencies between the two tasks. Three-, five-, and seven-year-old subjects exhibited significantly more disfluencies on the Sentence Modeling Task than on the Sentence Imitation Task.

2. No significant difference was shown in the number of disfluencies among the SAAD, PUT, and PAS constructions.

3. Three-year-old subjects produced significantly more dis fluencies than the five- and seven-year-old subjects. A significant difference was not demonstrated between five-year-old and seven-year old subjects; though there was a trend of decreased frequency of dis fluencies with increased age.

4. There was not a significant relationship between total number of disfluencies and total number of sentence imitation errors.

5. A significant relationship between total number of dis fluencies and total number of sentence modeling errors was found.

6. There was a significant relationship between total number of modeling errors and total number of disfluencies occurring on the SAAD construction.

7. The results indicated a significant relationship between total number of sentence modeling errors and total number of dis fluencies on the PUT constructions.

8. The relationship between the total number of sentence modeling errors and the total number of disfluencies occurring on the PAS construction was not significant. The results of this study support some previous findings reported in the literature regarding disfluencies of nonstuttering children, while failing to support others. On the basis of the results, the following conclusions may be drawn:

1. Three-, five-, and seven-year-old nonstuttering children exhibit more disfluencies when performing a sentence modeling production task than when performing a sentence imitation task.

2. Three-year-old nonstuttering children are significantly more disfluent than nonstuttering five and seven year olds.

3. The occurrence of disfluencies in nonstuttering children decreases as age increases.

4. There appears to be a relationship between the number of sentence modeling errors and number of disfluencies when children perform a sentence modeling task. Conversely, there appears to be no relationship between number of sentence imitation errors and number of disfluencies when children perform a sentence imitation task.

5. The relationship between number of sentence production errors and the number of disfluencies for specific syntactic constructions is complicated. There appears to be a trend for a relationship between modeling errors and disfluencies produced on SAAD and FLIT constructions.

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