Past tense marking in the spontaneous speech of preschool children who do and do not stutter

PurposeThe aim of this study was to identify whether different patterns of errors exist in irregular past-tense verbs in children who stutter (CWS) and children who do not stutter (CWNS).MethodSpontaneous language samples of thirty-one age- and gender-matched pairs of children (total N = 62) between the ages of 24 months and 59 months were analyzed.ResultsResults indicated that children who do and do not stutter over-regularize irregular past-tense verbs (i.e., saying runned for ran) with comparable frequency. However, two nonsignificant trends which suggest possible intra-group differences were noted. First, irregular past tense verbs represented a greater portion of total verbs for CWS than for CWNS. Second, CWS appeared to double-mark (i.e., say ranned for ran) more often than CWNS. Results are discussed in light of theories about the acquisition of the irregular past-tense and about differences in language skills between CWS and CWNS.Educational objectives: After reading this article, the reader will be able to: (a) summarize previous findings about connections between stuttering and language in CWS and CWNS; (b) describe similarities and differences between irregular past-tense verb use and errors in CWS and CWNS; (c) discuss possible connections between the declarative–procedural model and stuttering.

► We pooled language samples from 62 children who do and do not stutter (CWS/CWNS) from four research sites to examine the prevalence of verb past-tense errors, which are thought to provide insight into the lexical and morphosyntactic abilities of language-learning children. While CWS and CWNS had similar error rates, the types of errors made by CWS often reflected double-marking of tense; CWS also used more irregular (lexicalized) verbs than CWNS. We propose that these behaviors reflect subtle differences in the morphosyntactic skills of CWS and CWNS.