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From: Jean Sawyer
Date: 08 Oct 2010
Time: 09:05:04 -0500
Remote Name: 138.87.160.94
Thank you for clarifying your question. I wish there were answers for what is the distribution across all types for all people, but there are answers for preschool children from a 1999 article by Ambrose and Yairi in the Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research. They looked at 90 preschool children who stuttered and 54 normally fluent preschool children, and found that for the children who stuttered, the most prevalent disfluency was part-word repetitions. For the normally fluent children, it was interjections. See the article for a breakdown of all disfluency types. There was one recent study of disfluencies in normally fluent adults by Roberts, Meltzer, and Wilding (2009) in the Journal of Communication Disorders. They looked at a sample of 25 adults speaking on three different topics and found interjections to be the most prevalent disfluency across the three topics (approximately 4%), followed by revisions (approximately 1.5%). As to why these are the most prevalent types, some have proposed that "other" disfluencies are reflective of linguistic planning, and that SLD may have a motoric influence, but there is a need for more study here. Jean