Developmental Disfluency and Emerging Grammar II

Co-Occurrence of Disfluency with Specified Semantic-Syntactic Structures

From a corpus of over 47,000 spontaneous utterances from four nonstuttering preschool children who were beginning to use syntax, 4,881 multiword, disfluent utterances were identified. Semantic-syntactic structures were identified among the disfluent multiword utterances and differences in frequeney of structures were examined. There was variability in the developmental disfluency of the individual children, but each child's pattern of disfluency was systematic across time. Developmental disflueney shifted across structures systematically for each child and appeared to reflect a "practice effect" for those children beginning to learn syntax. The co-occurrence of disfluency with specific syntactic structures supported the premise that developmental disfluency was more strongly attached to the syntax of utterances than to the production of particular words.