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Re: large vocabulary and stuttering in 2 1/2 year old

From: Steve Hood
Date: 10/13/00
Time: 1:33:36 PM
Remote Name: 199.33.133.50

Comments

Hi, Betty

Without actually interacting with your child it is hard to be specific. I do not know the frequency of her disfluencies or the types of disfluencies she has. But, I do have some reactions to what you have written.

When children are under various types of pressure or stress, they are more apt to be disfluent. We think often of stresses as being things like hurried, and interrupted. Another type of pressure is linguistic pressure. Children between the ages of 2 and 5 are learning a lot of language, increasing their vocabulary, generating longer and more complex sentences, and generally sounding more and more like little adults.

For children who are delayed or disorders in language development, they are sometimes more disfluent because they are having problems communicating **AT** their age level. For children who are precosious and advanced in developing language, they are sometimes more disfluent because of the stresses they face talking **above** their age level. I wonder if your child might be in this second group.

We once worked with a child who was in about the third grade. He was stuttering quite severely. At age 8, he stuttered on words such as: indigenous, imminent, catestrophic and surpurfluous. We later found out that his dad was an English professor, and wanted his son to develop the best language and vocabulary possible, so every night there was about 25 minutes of intense vocabulary drill.

If you think some of this might be happening in your situation, see if you can back off on language and vocabulary expectations, and encourage your child to do the same. Talk with the correct grammar and vocabulary (don't "baby-talk" with you child, but back off and try to reduce the lenngth and complexity of your sentences. If the problem persists, if your child's disfluencies occur on more than about 8% of the words spoken, and if you see signs where she is prolonging sounds, showing any tension and struggle, or repeating primarily sounds and syllables rather than whole words and phrases, then attannge for a complete diagnostic evaluation by a speech-language pathologist who has a good background in childhood disfluencies and childhood stuttering.

Steve Hood


Last changed: September 12, 2005