An investigation of syntactic skills and syntactic loci of disfluencies in stutterers, highly disfluent nonstutterers, and highly fluent nonstutterers
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Abstract
This study compared the syntactic skills of stutterers, highly disfluent nonstutterers, and highly fluent nonstutterers utilizing Developmental Sentence Scoring (DSS) procedures. Incorporating analysis of covariance techniques with age and speaker classification as independent variables, significant differences among total DSS scores were found for speaker classifications. Since mean DSS scores for stutterers fell between the mean scores of the two nonstuttering groups, no clear relationship between stuttering and syntactic skills was determined.Loci of disfluencies for stutterers were analyzed by individual categories within the DSS model utilizing one-way analysis of variance with repeated measures techniques. Loci of disfluencies occurred significantly more frequently in the categories of Wh-questions, conjunctions, and personal pronouns. Limitations of this research were given to account for these differences.