Comparison of language skills and fluency of children with and without stuttering at different levels of language tasks

In this study, the fluency and language skills of 3-7 year-old children in rapid picture naming, sentence repetition, structured conversation, and narration tasks were compared. The participants were 51 children with stuttering (CWS) and 144 children without stuttering (CWNS). In addition, an observation form was completed by the parents of CWS, which aimed to evaluate the child's fluency and the negative effects of fluency. Results indicated that CWS had more stuttering-like disfluencies in all the tasks than CWNS, as expected. Most stuttering occurred on the narration task, followed by structured conversation, sentence repetition, and rapid picture naming tasks, respectively. In terms of language skills, CWS had poorer performance on the overall language skills, rapid picture naming, sentence repetition, and narration tasks than CWNS. When language skills performance was compared according to age groups, no significant differences were observed between CWS and CWNS, except for 5 year-olds. Moreover, there was a significant highly moderate positive correlation between the total dysfluency score of CWS and the total score of observation form completed by the parents of CWS which evaluated the disfluencies of their children (r=0.548, p<0.001). There was no significant relationship between age and the section of the form which evaluated the negative impact of CWS of dysfluencies. Research findings reveal that the disfluencies of CWS is impacted by grammatical complexities. Findings also support the claim that CWS, as a group, have poorer language skills than CWNS.