Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
---|---|---|---|---|
911424 | Journal of Fluency Disorders | 2012 | 11 Pages |
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.