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Disfluencies of Young Children in Two Speaking Situations

Ten normal-speaking children, ages 3.5 to 4.5, conversed with a "talking" puppet and with an adult female for 10 20-minute sessions. For 10 minutes of each session the child conversed with the puppet (no person present); for the remaining 10 minutes the child conversed with an adult. Counts were made of the number of disfluencies emitted by the children, the number of words spoken by the children, the number of words spoken by the adult, and the number of words spoken by the puppet. The experiment yielded the following results: (1) the number of words produced by the children was stable across the 10 sessions; (2) within each session, the children produced more words with the puppet than with the adult; (3) the percent of words produced disfluently was stable across all 10 sessions; and (4) there was no statistically significant difference in percent disfluencies by the children between the adult and puppet conditions.