INVESTIGATING LANGUAGE FACTO S IN J ORDANIAN STUTTERERS

Abstract

ABSTRACT . This study is an investigation of certain linguistic characteristics of a group of Jordanian stutterers. It is a replication of previous researches done for English-speaking persons who stutter. As a pioneer study, the present study can be considered as an early trial to investigate the linguistic characteristics of the-moments of stuttering. The purpose of this study is to explore the following language factors in stuttering: phonetic difficulty, the lexical and grammatical factors (word class, word length, and word position), distribution of stuttering in sentences -and its relationship to sentence length and clause position, and syntactic complexity. The importance of such factors is to find more support to the psycholinguistic theory of stuttering, to test the universality of such factors, and to help clinicians design better therapy programs. The seventy- four subjects of the study, randomly chosen, are thought to represent various socioeconomic statuses and a wide age range. They were classified into three age groups. The speech sample collected is quite comprehensive since it included both oral readings and conversational speech and covered a wide range of responses that ranged from one-word utterances to long complex sentences. The results of this study can be summarized as follows: l. A rank order of sound difficulty for Jordanian subjects who stutter was established. ' 2. There was significantly and consistently more stuttering on content words than on function words. 3. There was significantly a gradual increase in stuttering along with the increase in word length. 4. Stutter occurrences were invariably in syllable-initial positions (99.3%), mostly in word-initial positions (84.1%). 5. Frequency of stuttering significantly increased when a short sentence was read as an initial clause of a long sentence relative to the frequency of stuttering when it was read alone. Also, the frequency of stuttering on a clause read as an initial part of a long sentence is significantly higher than when it was read as a final clause. 6. For short sentences, stutters occurred at the first words in a way that they declined from one word to the consecutive word. However, this feature diminishes on longer sentences in a way that stutters distributed along all positions of the long sentence, with only relative increase at the first word. 7. The mean percentage of stuttering during oral readings of syntactically complex passages was significantly higher the mean percentage of stuttering during oral readings of syntactically simple passages for both readers’ groups. This study concludes that the language factors that were investigated in the present study have a clear influence on the site and frequency of stutters’ occurrences for the Arabic- speaking individuals who stutter, as it is the case for persons who stutter from other cultures. This may refer to the universality of such factors, which have to be taken into consideration when looking for an explanation of stuttering.