The Effect of Syllable Structure on the Frequency of Disfluencies in Adults With Stuttering

Stuttering is one of the most prevalent speech and language disorders. Symptomatology of stuttering has been surveyed from biological, developmental, environmental, emotional, learning and linguistic viewpoints. Literature shows that syllable structure as a linguistic feature, may influence the frequency of disfluencies. This study aimed to determine the effect of syllable structure on the frequency of disfluencies in adults with stuttering. This cross-sectional descriptive-analytic study was performed on 16 adults (14 males and 2 females) who stutter with the mean age of 24.56 years. The frequency of disfluencies was evaluated by asking the subjects to read two lists, one list contained 60 words and another one consisted of 60 nonwords. The words and nonwords were selected based on simple and difficult syllable structures. The data were statistically analyzed through paired t-test using the SPSS software. The results of this study showed a significant difference between the frequency of disfluencies between the simple syllable structures and difficult syllable structures in nonword reading tasks (P < 0.05). There was no significant difference in the frequency of disfluencies between the simple syllable structures and difficult syllable structures in word reading tasks (P > 0.05). The findings of this study indicate that the frequency of disfluencies was increased in difficult syllable structures in comparison to simple syllable structures. According to the results, it seems that certain linguistic features, such as syllable structure can affect speech-motor output in people who stutter through affecting phonological encoding.