Stuttering and Bilingualism in Children and Adults

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Linguistic overload?

From: Susan Kemp
Date: 12 Oct 2008
Time: 14:12:37 -0500
Remote Name: 70.144.78.4

Comments

Hello Rosalee. In the article, Stuttering out of Bilingualism (1992), Karniol presented a case report of a bilingual child (Hebrew/English) who began to severely stutter at two years of age. When practice of using the nondominant English language was stopped, the child regained normal fluency in his dominant Hebrew language. Instrestingly enough, when English was reintroduced at three years three months, stuttering did not return. Karniol proposed that stuttering can come from syntactic overload. Do you believe that the demands placed upon some young children for speaking two languages, which involves leaning two sets of linguistic rules, may overchallenge the children's abilities and cause disfluencies?


Last changed: 10/12/08