Stuttering in Children Study

This article details an empirical study of 60 children; 30 children who stutter, and 30 matched children who do not stutter. The intended purpose of the study was to account for the frequency, type, and possible origin of the speech disfluencies observed in these children. The instrument used for evaluation was the Covert Repair Hypothesis. The method used was video and audio taping and analysis by three trained individuals. The results obtained by this study confirmed the work of previous researchers.

The Covert Repair Hypothesis suggests that stutterings are produced as the by-product of self-repairs or self-corrections of speech errors. The Covert Repair Hypothesis is based on the "activation-spreading" or "connectionist" models of speech production. These models attempt to account for the generation of speech by assuming that speech is created by connecting nodes of speech. Nodes are found at the word, syllable, and segment levels of speech. The Covert Repair Hypothesis assumes that the self-repairs, of people who stutter, are an attempt to accommodate to a temporarily impaired ability to phonologically encode speech. The Covert Repair Hypothesis suggests that for children with stutters the intended phonemes are slower to activate than in children without stutters.

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tory deprivation. Normal spoken language is produced at decibel levels between 20dB and 60dB. A loss of 20 to 40dB significantly affects the amount and quality of speech perceived by a child. Early otitis media, between the years 2 and 4, when a child is at a critical stage of language development, would seem to be a causal factor for later language and speech impairments. This study, by critically breaking down the types of auditory discrimination in language perception, confirms the need for closely following the child with recurrent early otitis media for language development. The authors statistical analysis was carefully controlled. The cohort was selected from the Nijmegen Otitis Media Group. This is a group of children, in the Netherlands, which were born between September 1, 1982 and August 31, 1983. Over 1400 children were examined at three month intervals for otitis media with tympanograms. Children with little or no compliance were diagnosed with otitis media. This allows for very accurate documentation of repeated otitis media occurrences in early childhood. Lack of good documentation, of recurrent otitis media, has been cited as a problem in other studies (47). The presence or absence of otitis media was
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Repair Hypothesis, Hearing Research, Created Meaning, Pennsylvania German, Dutch Afrikaans, Otitis Media, Van Ness, otitis media, Ohio Amish, Bon Wim, covert repair hypothesis, covert repair, repair hypothesis, Covert Repair, pennsylvania german, children stutter, language development, gender neutral, language impairment, otitis media language, children otitis, van ness, effects otitis media, children otitis media, recurrent otitis media,
Approximate Word count = 1533
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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