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Re: Stuttering Among Bilingual People

From: Lynne Shields
Date: 10/15/02
Time: 9:31:33 AM
Remote Name: 199.217.208.172

Comments

Kylie,

What you have noticed in your friend is similar to what I have observed in a number of clients with whom I have worked. I am seeing a woman from China at the moment, who reports that she stutters most in her home dialect, less in Mandarin and the least in English. She believes that the difference in her level of fluency for Chinese is related to the fact that her native dialect contains sounds that require harder attacks than Mandarin. As far as speaking English, she says that she has to speak slower and believes that this contributes to her increased fluency. On the other hand, she reports that some of the disfluencies she has in English are related to the fact that she cannot as easily substitute words, since her vocabulary is much smaller. So, I suspect that there are a number of factors that may contribute to differences in stuttering across languages for bilingual speakers.

While there may be factors contributing to differences in stuttering in different languages for a particular speaker, I think it is important to look carefully at each person individually. For example, a number of years ago, I worked with a teenaged boy who stuttered in each of his three languages, despite having good skills in each. His father reported that his son was much more fluent in English than in the primary native language. The boy reported that he stuttered about the same in each language. The father demonstrated by talking with his son in their native language and, as he predicted, his son was much more disfluent. However, I noted that the boy was also quite disfluent when speaking English with his father. It turned out that the primary indicator of increased disfluency was speaking with his parents, not the particular language used.

There is research related to biligualism and stuttering. I believe that Nan Bernstein-Ratner has published in this area. Hopefully, she will comment here.

Thanks for your question.

Regards,

Lynne


Last changed: September 14, 2005