Evaluation and comparison of Effect of the syntactic complexity on the amount of speech dysfluency of stuttering and nonstuttering Persian-speaker adults in imitation task

Abstract

Introduction: Recently, researchers have increasingly interested in learning about the relationship between stuttering and utterance length. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of utterance length on the amount of speech dysfluency in Farsi-speaking adults who do and do not stutter through an imitative speech task. The obtained results can pave the way for reaching a better understanding of adulthood stuttering as well as developing more appropriate treatment methods. Materials and Methods: 15 people who do stutter and 15 fluent controls (age range, 15 to 50 years) who spoke Farsi as their native language and were matched by age and gender participated in this cross-sectional study. All participants were assessed by ten sets of simple and complex sentences. In order to assess the impact of syntactic complexity on dysfluency, each sentence in a given set had one morpheme more than the previous one. The obtained data were statistically analyzed through paired t test using SPSS software. Results: Neither in the stuttering nor in the nonstuttering groups, simple and complex sentences did not differ significantly from each other on the basis of the amounts of dysfluency produced (P > 0.05). Conclusion: The results of this study showed that during sentence imitation tasks, syntactic complexity did not affect dysfluency amount neither in people who stutter nor in those who do not. It is imperative to attend to linguistic factors when dealing with children and adults who stutter and to consider syntactic complexity throughout the treatment process at the sentence level. Keywords: Stuttering, Children, Adults, Imitation task, Syntactic complexity