From: Anne Bothe
Date: 10/24/00
Time: 11:15:57 AM
Remote Name: 128.192.22.206
Interesting question! The different answers that people will give you will range from age 2 to age 4 for being able to "correctly" diagnose stuttering in a young child. The differences in these answers are because people will define "correctly" differently, define "stuttering" differently, and make different assumptions about how long it needs to have been going on before we should label it "stuttering." My answer is that a child as young as 2;6 or even as young as 2;3 or 2;4 who has been showing disfluent speech of the type that you are willing to label "stuttered speech" for several weeks can be diagnosed as stuttering -- but if you see a little one aged only 2;2 and you think it's stuttering then I would not hesitate to go ahead and diagnose it as stuttering. Thanks for the question!