All people experience speaking disfluency including children. Even, disfluency in communication is considered often happen in children speaking ability. However, speaking fluency matters in terms of delivering speakers’ ideas. Thus, if a child has difficulty in conveying their needs, ideas, or feeling, this thing will make teachers and parents difficult in understanding their speaking as well. These things make us curious and wonder how the children speaking ability can be categorized as speech disorder or disfluency in speaking is assumed to be a normal thing.
The example of speech disfluency is hesitation which is signed by a silent pause, and interjections of word fillers (e.g., "the subject is like difficult") and nonword fillers (e.g., "The subject is uh difficult"). Other examples include whole-word repetitions (e.g., "But-but I can not do that") and phrase repetitions or revisions (e.g., "This is a- this is a problem"). These are generally considered to be nonstuttered (typical) disfluencies (Ambrose & Yairi, 1999; Tumanova, Conture, Lambert, & Walden, 2014).
Speech disfluencies are usually experienced by children between the ages of 2 and 7. it is the normal part of speech. There are several normal speech disfluencies and stuttering is the most common classification of disfluencies. Most children who stutter, begin to do so around 2 and a half years of age (e.g., Mansson, 2007; Yairi & Ambrose, 2005; Yaruss, LaSalle, & Conture, 1998). Approximately 95% of children who stutter start to do so before the age of 5 years (Yairi & Ambrose, 2005). Stuttering is a disorder of childhood and follows a predicatble developmental path (Bloodstein, 1960). The types of speech disfluencies most frequently associated with stuttering are: within-word disfluencies (i.e., prolongations, blocks and sound and syllable repetitions) and monosyllabic repetitions. Between word disfluencies (i.e., short monosyllabic whole-word repetitions, polysyllabic whole-word repetitions, revisions, interjections) occur in the speech of both stuttering and normally fluent individuals.
Speech disfluencies can be caused by several factors. The first is genetic. For genetics case, speech disfluencies can be inherited in families. In other words, if there is the member of your family who stutters then there is a higher chance for you to stutter. The second is Neurogenic factors. Neurogenic stuttering typically followed by some sort of injury or disease to the central nervous system i.e. the brain and spinal cord, including cortex, subcortex, cerebellar, and even the neural pathway regions.
Another factors depend on the child’s language skill and the ability to move his or her own mouth. Enviroment can also be the cause of speech disfluency, an environment that is very stressful may pressure the chidren and make them more difficult to produce fluent speech.
The best way to treat the children who have a problem of speech disfluency is by conducting intervention between children and families in early childhood. It is true that children who experience speak disfluency is normal but parents can not easily ignore it and think that their children will get better without paying more attention to them. The parents must approach and encourage them to speak more. Therefore, Speech disfluency can be reduced and the children can obtain normal speech when they are getting older.
Source :
Yairi, E. & Ambrose, N. (2005). Early childhood stuttering. Austin : Pro- Ed, Inc.
Tumanova, V., Conture, E. G., Lambert, E. W., & Walden, T. A. (2014). Speech disfluencies of preschool-age children who do and do not stutter. Journal of communication disorders, 49, 25-41.
Mansson H. (2007). Complexity and diversity in early childhood stuttering. In J. Au-Yeung & M. Leahy (Eds.), Proceedings of the Fifth World Congress on Fluency Disorders (pp. 98-101). Dublin, Ireland: The International Fluency Association.
Yaruss, J. S., LaSalle, L. R., & Conture, E. G. (1998). Evaluating stuttering in young children: Diagnostic data. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 7(4), 62-76.
Picture Source :
http://www.blurton-fdc.com/is-your-child-stuttering/