Detecting Trade-Offs Between Fluency and Language

For the last two decades researchers (Colburn & Mysak, 1982; Gaines, Runyan, & Meyers, 1991; Gordon & Luper, 1989; Hill & Gordon, 1995; St. Louis, Murray, & Ashworth, 1991; Wall & Myers, 1982) have examined the link between the language ability of the speaker and stuttering. They found that stuttering occurred more often in novel syntactic structures (Colburn & Mysak, 1982), longer and more complex utterances (Gaines et al., 1991), and sentence generation (rather than imitated sentences) (Gordon & Luper, 1989). In evaluating the speech of children who stutter, most standard assessment protocols include picture description and conversational speech samples. Some of the more thorough ones suggest sampling a variety of speaking situations. However, most do not look at higher language skills and whether or not there is any interaction between language complexity and stuttering. These assessment protocols reflect the ambiguity of our current understanding of connections between fluency and language.