A Comparative Study on Articulation Abilities of Turkish Children with Stuttering and Children with Typical Development

Abstract

This study aims to explore the relationship between articulation abilities and stuttering in Turkish children. The participants were 56 Turkish speaking, monolingual children with stuttering and 56 typically developing peers, aged between 3.0 and 8.11 years. A generalized linear model was used to assess between group differences with regard to articulation abilities, age and sex. The results revealed that the group effect (Wald chi(2) (1) = 215.64, p < 0.001, beta = 0.14) and the sex effect (Wald chi(2) (1) = 215.64, p = 0.001, beta = 0.74) was significant in all age groups. Girls who stutter performed significantly better compared to boys in the preschool age group on articulation abilities while there was no sex effect in the school age group. There was a correlation between family history of stuttering and articulation abilities (r = 0.321, p = 0.001) and, between time passed since the onset of stuttering and the articulation abilities (r = 0.342, p = 0.001) in the stuttering group. The correlation between stuttering severity and articulation abilities was not statistically significant (r = 0.048, p = 0.928). Findings of the study suggest that there are subtle differences between groups regards to articulation abilities increasing with age.