Differences in production of disfluencies in children with typical language development and children with mixed receptive-expressive language disorder

There are several studies about non-fluency inpeople who stutter, but comparatively few regardingchildren with language impairment. The currentresearch body regarding disfluencies in childrenwith language impairment has been using differentstudy-designs and definitions, making some resultsrather contradictory. The purpose of the present study is to expand theknowledge about disfluencies in children withlanguage impairment and compare the occurrenceof disfluencies between children with languageimpairment and children with typical languagedevelopment in the same age group. A total of ten children with language impairmentand six children with typical language developmentparticipated in this study. The subjects wererecorded when talking freely about a thematicpicture or toys and then analysed by calculatingdisfluencies per 50 words including frequency ofdifferent kinds of disfluencies according to Johnsonand Associates’ (1959) classic taxonomy. Our results show that children with languageimpairment do produce statistically significant moredisfluency in general, notably sound and syllablerepetition, broken words and prolongations