Contribution prosodique pour la compréhension du bégaiement en Portugais Européen

Silverman and Bernstein [S&B97] compared the fluency of stuttering and nonstuttering adolescents and concluded that syntactic complexity plays an important role in stuttering. Logan’s results [Log01] do not support this hypothesis. The present work goes in the line of Bergmann [Berg86] research who, taking previous studies of stuttering into account, suggested that stuttering is a prosodic disturbance. Our findings show that both syntactic complexity and prosodic length of phrases do not affect stuttering. By contrast, the most relevant factors constraining stuttering emerge from prosodic structure and prosodic prominence: it occurs at the beginning of the Phonological Phrase’s first Prosodic Word (usually unstressed) and at the Intonational Phrase medial position, even with subjects longer than 8 syllables.