Stuttering and Bilingualism in Children and Adults

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Re: Diversity in languages other than English

From: Rosalee Shenker
Date: 05 Oct 2008
Time: 09:08:44 -0500
Remote Name: 70.51.22.72

Comments

This is a good questions with not much research to answer it. Brian Humphrey ( in 2004 proceedings of the 4th World Fluency Congress) compared the mean disfluency rates identified by unilingual and bilingual students with no significant differences in the mean number of disfluencies reported by the 2 groups. Van Borsal and de Britto Pereira (2005-Journal Fluency Disorders) found that native speakers asked to judge stutters of adult stutterers, were significantly more accurate in judging stutters in their native language. I would say that it is generally difficult to accurately judge stutters in a language that you are not familiar with and that a first step would be to learn more about the normal rhythm, prosody, etc of the unfamiliar language before attempting to judge it for stutters.


Last changed: 10/05/08