By the Numbers: Disfluency Analysis for Preschool Children who Stutter

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Re: Syllable Counts

From: Jean Sawyer
Date: 20 Oct 2010
Time: 10:47:10 -0500
Remote Name: 138.87.138.185

Comments

Hi Rebecca, I am glad to hear you enjoyed the article. In very young children, word count often is the same as syllable count, as their words are often 1 syllable in length. In an assessment of preschool children's speech, you want to have an example of as much stuttering behavior as you can obtain. If, for example, a child has a repetition of 5 units, you would want to sample that. In my research, the longer the child talked (up to 1,200 syllables), the more disfluent he or she became. So those 5-unit repetitions may come after the child has been speaking for 20 minutes or so. I recommend at least 600 syllables for a speech sample. You don't have to analyze all of it, but a longer sample will likely have more instances of stuttering. Jean


Last changed: 10/20/10