Stuttering in Bilingual English-Spanish Children: Analysis of Language-Dependent Differences in Frequency and Type of Stuttering

The present study was conducted in order to better understand how stuttering appears in bilingual Spanish-English (SE) speakers in Arizona. The primary purpose was to determine whether the frequencies and types of speech disfluencies that are produced by bilingual speakers vary depending on the language they are speaking in. In addition, the study attempted to determine whether there exists a variation of the frequencies or types of speech disfluencies that are produced by a bilingual speaker based on their approximate dominance of the language they are speaking in. For the purpose of the study, two elementary school children (2 boys, 7 and 10 years old), who were identified as diagnosed stutterers by a speech-language pathologist (SLP), were recruited and interviewed for 45 minutes. The two participants were identified as typically fluent in both English and Spanish from conversations with their parents and the pre-interview parental questionnaire in which their level of exposure to and approximate competence in each language was established. The interviews consisted of a speech and reading portion in both English and Spanish, in which spontaneous and non-spontaneous speech data was recorded. The results of the study indicate that there does seem to be a difference in the frequencies and types of speech disfluencies that appear depending on the language that a bilingual individual is speaking in. Additionally, there seems to be a relationship between approximate language dominance and the types or frequencies of speech disfluencies that are produced, however further research is recommended on this topic with a larger sample size of participants.