ges in his or her speech and language that produce dysfluencies. The recovery of the individual from acquired stuttering can either be spontaneous or subsequent to any number of forms of treatment (i.e., minimal, intensive, short-term, long--,term, etc.). While there have been cases of adults undergoing acquired stuttering that have been soundly documented, those involving children lack consensus as to etiology given confusion with the onset of idiopathic stuttering.
Normal and Language-Learning Disabled Children
There are numerous ways in which dysfluencies in both speech and language can occur that are subsequent to head trauma, though vascular and neurological injury prove to have the highest rate of producing dysfluency. MacLaghlan and Chapman (1988) report that communication breakdowns occur within the conversations and narration of normal and language-learning disabled children. Of significance here is that learning disability has been postulated to have as its etiology head trauma, among other causes. Such communication breakdowns typically consist of planning errors, unsuccessful lexical searches, failure to supply necessary information to the listener, and execution errors such as phonological reversals" (p. 2). Evans (MacLaghlan & Chapman, 1988, p. 2) adds that communication breakdowns can include filled pauses, repetitions, self-initiated repairs, and abandoned utterances.
In a study of 21 children, consisting of 3 groups (i.e., 7 language-learning disabled (LLD) children, 7 aged-matched (AM) children, and 7 mean length of communication length (MLCU) children), MacLaghlan and Chapman (1988) discovered that the LLD group evidenced a mean of 0.56 in conversation and narration communication breakdowns, versus a mean of 0.41 for the AM and MLCU groups. The mean of 0.33 was evidenced for the LLD group as regards conversation communication breakdowns, which was just under the 3group mean of 0.35 for this category,...