Analysis of language factors in a multilingual stutterer

Abstract

The apparently predictable occurrence of stuttering in English-speaking stutterers has been well documented and has revealed a number of rules regarding stuttering loci known as the language factors. This study investigated the presence of these language factors (the phonetic, grammatic, word and sentence locus, word length and syllabic stress factors) in the spontaneous speech of a multilingual stutterer: The subject (B) was a 19-year old male with a severe stutter who spoke four languages, structurally divisible into two main groups: English and French (largely analytical word based languages), and Swahili and Kinyarwanda (African languages with rich morphology). Results confirmed the presence of the phonetic and word locus factors in English and French but this was not observed in the African languages, indicating distinct structural variation between languages. The grammatic factor was the only factor significant across all four languages, while the sentence position factor was not significant in any language. The word length factor was significant for all languages except Swahili, perhaps confounded by the over-representation of long words in this language. Syllabic stress was significant in both English and Swahili indicating a strong robustness of this factor across both a stress-timed and syllable-timed language.