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Re: Language Acquisition

From: Nan Ratner
Date: 10/2/02
Time: 2:17:22 PM
Remote Name: 129.2.25.203

Comments

I actually do a lot of work in this area, so I will chime in here. There seems to be a trend in studies we and others have conducted, for children who stutter to have slightly lower lexical and syntactic skills than comparison children who don't stutter. A lot of this stuff is in print, including one additional one in press that I will be posting to my web site, and you can read the original articles there. Additionally, we find that children at the onset of stuttering are more likely to stutter on sentences that are more difficult to formulate, as measured by complexity estimates and their own formulation errors. Finally, recovery from stuttering MAY be linked to a guided or self-discovered reduction in children's spontaneous language attempts. We did some work with the Lidcombe people (see above thread)(this article is under Bonelli et al. on my web site) that showed that children who became more fluent during this program used simpler language than they had previously, perhaps as a result of their parents' reinforcement of fluent utterances, which are usually shorter and simpler than those that are stuttered in a child's speech.


Last changed: September 14, 2005