LANGUAGE AND DISFLUENCY IN

NONSTUTTERING CHILDREN’S
CONVERSATIONAL SPEECH
J. SCOTT YARUSS
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

ROBYN M. NEWMAN
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois

TRACY FLORA
Tacoma School District, Tacoma, Washington

Several recent theories have suggested that the production of speech disfluencies is related,
in part, to certain aspects of language formulation. One common characteristic of these the-
ories is the proposal that the same basic mechanism is responsible for disfluency in people
who stutter as well as in people who do not stutter. To learn more about the connection be-
tween language formulation and fluency in nonstuttering speakers, this study examined rela-
tionships between syntactic complexity, utterance length, and disfluency in the spontaneous
speech of 12 normally fluent children (six girls and six boys, age 44–64 months), who pro-
duced 50-utterance spontaneous speech samples during conversations with a speech–lan-
guage pathologist. On average, disfluent utterances were longer and more syntactically
complex than fluent utterances. Discriminant analyses indicated that utterance length in
clausal constituents was the most important factor (among those assessed in this study) for
predicting the likelihood that an utterance would be disfluent. Analysis of subjects’ individ-
ual speech samples indicated that the selected aspects of linguistic complexity could only
classify fluent and disfluent utterances at better than chance levels for a subgroup of sub-
jects. Findings provide one means of evaluating theories that explain speech disfluencies
based on normal language formulation process. Results also emphasize the value of consid-
ering individual patterns in children’s speech fluency, and highlight the need to consider
factors such as the timing of utterances or other contextual factors, in addition to linguistic
complexity, in future studies of children’s speech fluency. ©1999 Elsevier Science Inc.

Key Words: Disfluency; Nonstutterers; Language formulation

In recent years, there has been growing interest in studying the relationships
between various processes of language formulation and the production of
speech disfluencies (see review in Bernstein Ratner, 1997). In addition to the

Address correspondence to J. Scott Yaruss, Ph.D., Communication Science and Disorders, University
of Pittsburgh, 4033 Forbes Tower, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA. e-mail: jsyaruss@csd.upmc.edu

J. FLUENCY DISORD. 24 (1999), 185–207

© 1999 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved. 0094-730X/99/$–see front matter
655 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10010 PII S0094-730X(99)00009-1
186 J. S. YARUSS, R. M. NEWMAN, and T. FLORA

therapeutic benefit of manipulating certain language characteristics, such as

utterance length or syntactic complexity (e.g., Ingham, 1993; Ryan, 1974),
there has also been a reemergence of linguistic factors in stuttering theory. For
example, Wingate’s (1988) “fault-line” hypothesis proposes that disfluencies
occur when a speaker has difficulty planning the transition from a syllable on-
set to the rime at the beginnings of words. The neuropsycholinguistic theory
(Perkins, Kent, & Curlee, 1991) addresses language factors in a different way
by suggesting that disfluencies occur when various aspects of the language
formulation process are not properly sequenced or integrated prior to speech
production. The Covert Repair Hypothesis (CRH; e.g., Postma & Kolk, 1993),
on the other hand, proposes that speech disfluencies are the byproducts of nor-
mal repair processes speakers engage in when they detect errors that arise dur-
ing preparation of a phonetic plan. Although each of these theories proposes a
different mechanism for explaining the production of speech disfluencies,
they are all similar in the sense that they identify language formulation as a
primary source factor for the production of speech disfluencies by both nor-
mally fluent speakers and individuals who stutter.
To evaluate these theories, then, it is helpful to examine relationships be-
tween language formulation and (dis)fluency in children’s speech. Several
such studies conducted with children who stutter (see reviews in Bernstein
Ratner, 1997, and Yaruss, 1999) have revealed that stuttering is generally
more likely to occur on longer and more syntactically complex utterances,
though the relationship is far from straightforward (Yaruss, 1999). Interest-
ingly, current stuttering theories frame the disfluencies produced by individu-
als who stutter within the same general context as those produced by individu-
als who do not stutter. To be sure, stuttering and normal disfluency differ in
terms of a number of key features. Still, by examining how language formula-
tion influences the production of disfluencies in normally fluent speakers, it
should be possible to evaluate some of the basic tenets of current theories that
are based on a relationship between language and disfluency.
Several studies have examined the relationships between utterance length,
syntactic complexity, and speech (dis)fluency in normally fluent children’s
speech (Gordon & Luper, 1989; Gordon, Luper, & Peterson, 1986; Haynes &
Hood, 1978; McLaughlin & Cullinan, 1989; Pearl & Bernthal, 1980; Bern-
stein Ratner & Sih, 1987). Like the studies conducted with children who stut-
ter, these studies have generally revealed that normally fluent young children
are more likely to produce speech disfluencies on longer, more syntactically
complex utterances. For example, Bernstein Ratner & Sih (1987), studying
both children who do stutter and children who do not stutter, found increases
in the occurrence of disfluencies when children imitated sentences represent-
ing incremental increases in length and developmental complexity (simple ac-
tive affirmative declarative, negative, question, passive, dative, prepositional
phrase, coordinate with forward reduction, right-embedded relative clause,
LANGUAGE AND DISFLUENCY 187

left-embedded complement clause, and center-embedded relative clause).

Gordon et al. (1986) found similar results when normally fluent children pro-
duced sentences representing increasing complexity (simple affirmative active
declarative with auxiliary 1 -ing, negative with contraction, future, negative
interrogative with contraction, passive, and auxiliary have with copula 1 -ing)
following an examiner’s model. Thus, it seems clear that longer, more syntac-
tically advanced or complicated utterances are associated with increased
speech disfluencies in children who do not stutter.
All of the studies cited above examined relationships between language
and fluency based on imitated utterances or utterances that were copied after
an investigator’s model (i.e., the investigator provided a model for one stimu-
lus picture, then the child responded to another stimulus picture using the
same syntactic structure). In fact, one of the primary purposes of the studies
by Gordon and colleagues cited above was to determine which speaking task
(imitation or modeling) elicited more disfluencies. Children tended to produce
more disfluencies on the modeling task, which requires some linguistic for-
mulation, than on the imitation task, which does not. Thus, in addition to high-
lighting the importance of the length and complexity of utterances in deter-
mining the likelihood of disfluencies, these studies also demonstrate that the
nature of the speaking task influences children’s production of speech disfluencies.
There have been very few, if any, studies that specifically compared the
length and complexity of fluent versus disfluent utterances produced by nor-
mally fluent children in spontaneous conversational speech. This is somewhat
surprising, given that the differences between imitation or modeling tasks and
spontaneous conversational speech have been discussed by a number of au-
thors (e.g., Kadi-Hanifi & Howell, 1992; Logan & Conture, 1995; Masterson
& Kamhi, 1992). Indeed, both Kadi-Hanifi and Howell (1992) and Logan and
Conture (1995) suggested that differences in elicitation techniques might ac-
count for some of the ambiguities and contradictions found in the literature on
language and speech fluency. One potential source of such differences is the
fact that the types of utterances children are asked to produce in imitation or
modeling elicitation tasks may not be similar to those produced by children in
spontaneous speech. A number of the imitation and modeling studies showed
that children are more likely to be disfluent on passive sentences (Gordon et
al., 1986; Pearl & Bernthal, 1980). In a study of the conversational speech of
3- to 5-year-old children who stutter, however, Yaruss (1999) reported that
only two instances of passive sentences occurred in a corpus of 900 spontane-
ous utterances. So, while it may be true that young children are more likely to
be disfluent on more complicated syntactic structures, this may not provide a
satisfactory explanation for the occurrence of disfluencies in children’s con-
versational speech.
Several other studies have examined the relationship between linguistic
complexity and fluency in the spontaneous conversational speech of children
188 J. S. YARUSS, R. M. NEWMAN, and T. FLORA

who stutter (Kadi-Hanifi & Howell, 1992; Gaines, Runyan, & Meyers, 1991;
Logan & Conture, 1995, 1997; Wall, Starkweather, & Cairns, 1981; Weiss &
Zebrowski, 1992; Wilkenfeld & Curlee, 1997; Yaruss, 1999). The majority of
these studies have indicated that longer, more complicated utterances are
more likely to be stuttered than shorter, simple utterances. Although some of
these studies of children who stutter did include a control group of children
who do not stutter (Kadi-Hanifi & Howell, 1992; Logan & Conture, 1997),
none reported direct comparisons of the fluent and disfluent conversational ut-
terances of normally fluent children. In fact, Kadi-Hanifi & Howell (1992) ap-
pear to have assessed only stuttered disfluencies. Accordingly, they reported
that their normally fluent subjects did not produce any “dysfluent syllables”
(i.e., stuttered disfluencies) in their conversational speech samples (p. 161).
Thus, further research will be necessary to determine whether linguistic fac-
tors that influence fluency in stuttering children’s conversational speech also
affect normally fluent children, and whether it is appropriate to utilize the
same linguistic theoretical frameworks for considering both normal and stut-
tered disfluencies.
Additional data regarding the relationship between linguistic factors and
speech fluency in normally fluent children’s conversational speech will also
help evaluate whether utterance length and syntactic complexity can be
viewed as “demands” that might affect children’s speech fluency when
viewed in a “demands and capacities” framework (e.g., Adams, 1990; Stark-
weather & Gottwald, 1990). Specifically, knowing more about how normally
fluent children respond to such language demands will help evaluate whether
increased utterance length and syntactic complexity might play a role in the
development of stuttering (e.g., Gaines et al., 1991; Gordon, 1991; Logan &
Conture, 1995). Although studies utilizing imitation and modeling procedures
revealed the expected result (i.e., that longer, more complicated utterances are
more likely to contain disfluencies), it is still important to assess these rela-
tionships in spontaneous conversational speech.
Finally, one additional issue that deserves some consideration is whether
the relationships between utterance length, syntactic complexity, and speech
fluency that have been found in group-averaged data can also be found on an
utterance-by-utterance basis (Yaruss, 1999). As noted above, previous studies
on the conversational speech of children who stutter have shown that stuttered
utterances are, on average, likely to be longer and more syntactically complex
than fluent utterances. Still, one recent evaluation of individual subjects’ data
(Yaruss, 1999), which attempted to relate the length and complexity of a par-
ticular utterance to the likelihood that that same utterance would contain a dis-
fluency, found that such a direct relationship existed for only a small subgroup
of subjects. A similar discrepancy between group and individual findings was
presented by Gaines et al. (1991). This is notable since many current theories
of stuttering, such as the ones highlighted above, appear to suggest that rela-
LANGUAGE AND DISFLUENCY 189

tionships between utterance length, syntactic complexity, and speech fluency

should operate on an utterance-by-utterance basis (i.e., the length or complex-
ity of a specific utterance is believed to influence the likelihood of disfluency
on that same utterance), rather than for groupaveraged data (i.e., on average,
disfluent utterances tend to be longer than fluent utterances). Of course, lin-
guistic factors are not the only characteristics of speech/language production
that influence the occurrence of disfluencies. Other factors, such as speaking
rate, time pressure, topic and content of messages, etc., as well as the charac-
teristics of the conversational partners’ speech, are also believed to play a role
in the production of disfluencies, so the relationships between linguistic fac-
tors and speech fluency should not be expected to be perfect. Still, by assess-
ing relationships between utterance length, syntactic complexity, and speech
fluency, it should be possible to gain a better understanding of the relative
contribution of these factors to the likelihood that stuttering will occur on a
given utterance.
In sum, recent theories about stuttering implicate aspects of language for-
mulation that are common in both children who stutter and children who do
not stutter. Accordingly, it may be valuable to assess the relationships be-
tween language and speech (dis)fluency in normally fluent children’s speech.
To do this, prior research on the relationships between various aspects of lan-
guage formulation and speech fluency in normally fluent children’s imitated or
modeled utterances should be supplemented with analyses of spontaneous con-
versational speech in order to more fully evaluate current theories about lan-
guage and fluency. The purpose of this study, therefore, was to compare the flu-
ent and disfluent conversational utterances of children who do not stutter using a
number of standard measures of utterance length and syntactic complexity.

METHOD

Subjects
Subjects were 12 normally fluent children (six girls and six boys), aged 44–64
months (mean 5 54.7 months; SD 5 5.7 months). These 12 subjects were se-
lected from a larger pool of 24 normally fluent subjects who had been re-
cruited from a local preschool as part of a larger study of children’s speech/
language production skills. Five potential subjects were excluded because
they did not produce 50 utterances in their speech samples that met the criteria
for the Developmental Sentence Scoring procedures (DSS; Lee, 1974), and
two older potential subjects were excluded to allow for closer age-matching
between male and female subjects (6 3 months) and to reduce the overall av-
erage age of subjects to 4 years, 6 months. In addition, five potential subjects
were excluded from the present study because they did not meet a minimum
criterion of five disfluent utterances in their 50-utterance samples (10% disflu-
190 J. S. YARUSS, R. M. NEWMAN, and T. FLORA

ent utterances), selected so that there would be at least a nominal of level dis-
fluency data for statistical comparisons in this study. Although this minimum
criterion might seem somewhat high for normally fluent children, it is impor-
tant to remember that all disfluency types, including normal disfluencies such
as revisions or interjections, were coded in this study. Overall, subjects’ fre-
quency of all types of disfluency in these 50-utterance conversational speech
samples ranged from 3.02% to 7.19% (i.e., between three and seven speech
disfluencies per 100 words of conversational speech), values that fall well
within the normal range of disfluencies for children in this age range. Because
of the relatively small number of so-called “less typical” types of disfluencies
produced by these children, and because of the statistical restrictions that
would be required to separate out disfluencies by type; however, no attempt
was made to determine how the different types of disfluencies might be re-
lated to the linguistic variables examined in this study.
As a part of their participation in the present study, each child’s speech and
language abilities were screened by a licensed and ASHA-certified speech–
language pathologist to verify that none of these 12 subjects in this study ex-
hibited any significant speech, language, or hearing concerns. DSS results
(see below) indicated that the degree of syntactic complexity exhibited by
these subjects during their conversational speech samples was within normal
limits for each child’s chronological age.

Data Collection
Each child was audio/videotape recorded during a 30-min spontaneous, con-
versational interaction with the first or third author. Spontaneous speech sam-
ples were elicited through parallel play using a toy farm and by creating sto-
ries about daily activities of the characters on the farm. All recordings were
made in a quiet room at the child’s preschool away from the child’s regular
classroom.
Video recordings were made using a camcorder (Panasonic AG-455)
linked to a portable S-VHS videotape recorder (Panasonic AG-5700) via a
portable timecode generator (Horita TG-50), which placed a visually apparent
timecode (hours:minutes:seconds:videoframes) on the screen above the child’s
image to facilitate data analysis. Audio recordings were made using a portable
wireless microphone system (Samson MR-1) retrofitted with a directional la-
valiere microphone (Audio Technica AT-831B).
Speech samples for the present study consisted of 50 consecutive com-
pletely intelligible conversational utterances that met the inclusion criteria for
the DSS procedure (see below). In keeping with prior research on this topic,
an utterance was defined as a string of words that (1) communicated an idea,
(2) was set apart by pauses, and (3) was bounded by a single intonational con-
tour (Kelly & Conture, 1992; Meyers & Freeman, 1985; Logan & Conture,
LANGUAGE AND DISFLUENCY 191

1995; Yaruss, 1997b, 1999; Yaruss & Conture, 1996). Following the audio-
video recording session, each child’s speech sample was transcribed into a
customized computer data base developed for this project by the first author,
and specific information pertaining to the fluency and linguistic complexity of
each utterance was determined, as follows:
Speech fluency. Each utterance was analyzed for the presence of speech
disfluencies, based on the broad continuum of “more typical” and “less typi-
cal” disfluencies described by Gregory and colleagues (Gregory, 1986; see
also Yaruss, 1997a). More typical disfluencies are those types that are most
likely to be produced by normally fluent speakers, including repetitions of
phrases (e.g., “I want- I want that”), revisions (e.g., “I want- I need that”), and
interjections (e.g., “um,” “er”). Less typical disfluencies are those types that
are most likely to be produced by individuals who stutter, including repeti-
tions of words, sounds, or syllables (e.g., “l-l-look”), prolongations (e.g.,
“lllook”), or blocks (e.g., “l—ook”). Given that the present subjects were nor-
mally fluent speakers, the vast majority of the disfluencies examined in this
study were of the more typical variety; however, less typical disfluencies were
also coded in order to provide a more complete picture of the relationship be-
tween language complexity and speech fluency in children who do not stutter.
Because the study was designed to examine potential relationships between
fluency and language at the utterance level, and because of the relatively small
number of utterances containing multiple disfluencies, no distinction was
made between utterances that contained only a single disfluency (148 of the
600 utterances) and utterances that contained more than one disfluency (34 of
those 148 utterances).
Utterance length. Based on the findings of Brundage and Bernstein Rat-
ner (1989; see also Yaruss, submitted) that different measures of utterance
length may be related to speech fluency in different ways, utterance length
was measured via a number of different indices. Specifically, length was mea-
sured in terms of the number of words, morphemes, and syllables per utter-
ance. In addition, length was also measured in terms of the number of clausal
constituents per utterance, based on a procedure described by Blake, Quartaro,
and Onorati (1993). According to this procedure, clausal constituents are de-
fined as subjects, verbs, objects, adverbials, and complements (Crystal, Gar-
man, & Fletcher, 1989). This measure was utilized in order to provide an indi-
cation of utterance length that is presumably related to syntactic complexity
(see also Logan & Conture, 1997; Yaruss, 1999).
Syntactic complexity. In keeping with previous studies on syntactic
complexity in the conversational speech of children who stutter (Gaines et al.,
1991; Logan & Conture, 1995; Weiss & Zebrowski, 1992), syntactic complex-
ity was measured using the DSS (Lee, 1974). The DSS assigns a point-value to
eight different components of children’s utterances (indefinite pronouns, per-
sonal pronouns, main verbs, secondary verbs, negatives, conjunctions, inter-
192 J. S. YARUSS, R. M. NEWMAN, and T. FLORA

rogative reversals, and wh- questions) based on stages of children’s language

development. The analysis is conducted on a sample of 50 consecutive, spon-
taneous, complete utterances containing a noun and a verb in a subject-predi-
cate relationship. Although the DSS has been criticized by some based on the
specific stages of language acquisition that are assessed (Crystal, et al., 1989;
see also Yaruss, 1999), for the purposes of the present study, it has the advan-
tage of assigning each utterance a single value representing syntactic com-
plexity that can be compared across fluent and disfluent utterances.

Data Analysis
Several different analyses were employed to evaluate the relationship between
utterance length, syntactic complexity, and speech fluency in these 12 nor-
mally fluent children’s conversational speech. First, Spearman rank-order cor-
relations were calculated for both group and individual data to assess relation-
ships between the various measures of length and complexity. This nonparametric
correlation procedure was selected for the group analyses because of the rela-
tively small number of data points in the group average data (n 5 12), and
also for the individual analyses because of the unequal sample sizes between
fluent and disfluent utterances. Second, the length and syntactic complexity of
fluent and disfluent utterances were compared using Mann-Whitney U tests
and Wilcoxon Signed-Ranks tests to determine whether disfluent utterances
were likely to be longer or syntactically more complex. Again, nonparametric
tests were selected because of unequal sample sizes and also because of an ap-
parent lack of heterogeneity of the variance between fluent and disfluent utter-
ances. Finally, 12 separate discriminant function analyses were used to deter-
mine whether the utterance length and syntactic complexity of a given
conversational utterance, when considered together, could be used to predict
the likelihood that an utterance would contain a normal disfluency. These
analyses were conducted for each subject’s 50-utterance speech sample indi-
vidually, and significance levels were Bonferroni-adjusted to maintain an
overall a 5 .05 (individual significance level for each of the 12 comparisons
was set at a 5 .004).

Intra- and Interjudge Measurement Reliability

Intra- and interjudge reliability was assessed for the identification of speech
disfluencies, as well as for the measurement of syntactic complexity (DSS)
and utterance length (morpheme, syllable, word, clausal constituent). A sam-
ple of 10 utterances was randomly selected from each subject’s conversational
speech sample (total 5 120 utterances, or 20% of the entire sample) and re-
transcribed and rescored for both intrajudge and interjudge agreement. Agree-
ment for categorical judgements (fluent versus disfluent utterance) was calcu-
LANGUAGE AND DISFLUENCY 193

lated based on Cohen’s (1960) Kappa (k) statistic, a relatively conservative

measure that accounts for chance agreement. Agreement for continuous vari-
ables (utterance length, syntactic complexity) was based on mean differences
and Pearson product-moment correlations.
Analyses revealed very strong agreement between the original and reana-
lyzed data for identification of disfluent utterances (k 5 1.00 for intrajudge
agreement; k 5 .97 for interjudge agreement). Similarly strong reliability was
obtained for measures of utterance length and syntactic complexity (mean dif-
ferences ranged from 20.08 to 0.04; SD ranged from 0.24 to 0.85). Finally,
strong positive Pearson product-moment correlations were found between
original and rescored data for both interjudge and intrajudge reliability mea-
sures (r ranged from .97 to .99; p , .001).

RESULTS

Summary Data
Table 1 summarizes the average utterance length (in words, syllables, mor-
phemes, clausal constituents), average DSS scores, and the total number of
disfluent utterances for each of the 12 subjects. Preliminary comparison re-
vealed so significant differences in the results of these measures between boys

Table 1. Average utterance length (in words, syllables, morphemes, and clausal
constituents), DSS scores, and number of disfluent utterances for each subject

Utterance length Number

Average of
Subject Age Clausal DSS disfluent
number Sex (months) Words Syllables Morphemes constituents score utterances
1 f 44 5.86 7.00 6.69 3.67 6.69 12
2 m 46 5.56 6.30 6.12 3.80 8.88 20
3 f 53 5.76 7.00 6.58 3.26 7.60 12
4 m 53 5.74 6.56 6.42 3.54 8.60 15
5 f 54 6.80 7.90 7.29 4.49 10.84 15
6 f 54 6.76 7.96 7.30 3.62 10.60 9
7 m 55 6.90 8.26 7.38 3.82 7.88 10
8 f 56 5.96 6.84 6.57 3.84 9.65 9
9 m 56 5.78 6.24 6.46 3.24 8.10 10
10 m 59 7.92 8.80 8.58 4.70 10.30 14
11 m 62 5.20 5.96 5.74 3.58 7.70 9
12 f 64 7.90 9.02 9.06 4.70 8.40 13
Average — 54.7 6.34 7.32 7.02 3.86 8.77 12.33
SD — 5.7 0.90 1.03 0.98 0.51 1.31 3.31
194 J. S. YARUSS, R. M. NEWMAN, and T. FLORA

and girls (paired t-tests; p-values ranged from .43 to .66), so results from boys
and girls were combined for the following analyses.

Utterance Length and Syntactic Complexity

It was anticipated that there would be considerable overlap between the vari-
ous measures of utterance length and syntactic complexity. Accordingly, rela-
tionships between these measures were examined using the Spearman rho
rank-order correlation analyses for both group and individual data.
Group data. Correlation analyses revealed very strong positive correla-
tions between the average utterance length measured in words, syllables, and
morphemes (rho ranged from .91 to .98, p , .001). Less strong, but still signif-
icant correlations were observed between average utterance length measured
in words, syllables, or morphemes and average utterance length measured in
clausal constituents (rho ranged from .65 to .75; p , .01). No significant cor-
relations were found between average DSS scores and any of the measures of
average utterance length (rho ranged from 2.07 to .27; p . .05).
Individual data. To determine whether relationships between measures
of utterance length and syntactic complexity were apparent on individual ut-
terances, correlations were also computed within each subject’s speech sam-
ple. Again as expected, strong correlations were found between the length of
individual utterances as measured in words, syllables, or morphemes for all
subjects (rho ranged from .91 to .97; p , .001). Utterance length measured in
clausal constituents was only moderately correlated with utterance length
measured in words, syllables, or morphemes (rho ranged from .62 to .87; p ,
.025) for all subjects except subject 3, for whom the number of clausal constit-
uents in an utterance was mildly correlated with the number of words, sylla-
bles, or morphemes in the utterance (rho ranged from .40 to .49). Nonsignifi-
cant weak-to-moderate correlations were found between the complexity of an
utterance measured by the DSS and the length of the utterance in words, sylla-
bles, morphemes, or clausal constituents (rho ranged from .37 to .67; p ranged
from .20 to .02).

Fluent versus Disfluent Utterances

Fluent and disfluent utterances were separated to determine whether the
length and complexity of disfluent utterances was greater than that of fluent
utterances. Analyses were computed both for group data averaged across sub-
jects as well as for subjects’ individual speech samples.
Group data. Figure 1 summarizes the differences between fluent and
disfluent utterances for measures of utterance length (in words, syllables, mor-
phemes, and clausal constituents) and syntactic complexity (DSS). In all
cases, disfluent utterances were significantly longer and more complex than
LANGUAGE AND DISFLUENCY 195

Figure 1. Differences between average utterance length (in words, syllables, mor-
phemes, and clausal constituents) and syntactic complexity (DSS) scores for fluent and
disfluent utterances. All differences were statistically significant (Wilcoxon Signed
Ranks Tests; p , .05).

fluent utterances (Wilcoxon Signed-Ranks Tests; Z ranged from 23.06 to

22.51; p ranged from .002 to .012).
Individual data. Differences between fluent and disfluent utterances
were also compared within each individual subject’s 50-utterance speech sam-
ple using Mann-Whitney U tests (Bonferroni-corrected; overall a 5 .05). As
summarized in Table 2, analyses of utterance length revealed significant dif-
ferences between fluent and disfluent utterances for only 2 out of 12 subjects
(16.7%) for length measured in words or syllables (subjects 1 and 10); 1 out of
12 subjects (8.3%) for length measured in morphemes (subject 10), though
differences approached Bonferroni-corrected significance levels for subjects 1
and 12 (p 5 .006); and 1 out of 12 subjects (8.3%) for length measured in
clausal constituents (subject 7), though, again, differences approached Bon-
ferroni-corrected significance levels for subjects 1 (p 5 .005) and 12 (p 5
.006). Similarly, analyses of the syntactic complexity in fluent versus disflu-
ent utterances revealed a difference in DSS scores that reached significance
for only 1 out of 12 subjects (8.3%; subject 6), and approached Bonferroni-
corrected significance levels for one other subject (subject 5; p 5 .008). A
number of other individual differences were apparent, but they but did not
reach or approach Bonferroni-corrected levels of significance. Thus, it ap-
 196
Table 2. Difference in average utterance length and syntactic complexity for fluent and disfluent utterances. Significance levels (p-values) are
reported for Mann-Whitney U comparisons computed within each subjects’ 50-utterance speech sample. Comparisons that reached
Bonferroni-corrected significance are noted with an asterisk (overall a = .05 for 12 comparisons for each measure; individual a = .004).
Utterance length Syntactic complexity
Words Syllables Morphemes Clausal constituents DSS
Subject
number Fluent Disfl. p-value Fluent Disfl. p-value Fluent Disfl. p-value Fluent Disfl. p-value Fluent Disfl. p-value

J. S. YARUSS, R. M. NEWMAN, and T. FLORA

1 5.08 8.25 .002* 6.03 10.00 .001* 5.97 8.92 .006 3.27 4.92 .005 6.24 8.08 .34
2 5.30 5.95 .20 5.80 7.05 .06 5.73 6.70 .11 3.77 3.85 .36 9.03 8.65 .78
3 5.34 7.08 .12 6.42 8.83 .20 6.08 8.17 .11 3.13 3.67 .64 6.71 10.42 .08
4 5.40 6.53 .22 6.29 7.20 .52 6.09 7.20 .43 3.43 4.00 .16 8.46 8.93 .67
5 6.24 8.07 .15 7.03 9.87 .09 6.62 8.80 .09 4.06 5.47 .08 8.91 15.20 .008
6 6.39 8.44 .05 7.51 10.00 .05 6.95 8.89 .09 3.54 4.00 .41 8.85 18.56 .004*
7 6.35 9.10 .03 7.70 10.50 .08 6.88 9.40 .04 3.55 4.90 .004* 7.18 10.70 .07
8 5.75 6.89 .20 6.50 8.33 .08 6.33 7.67 .12 3.78 4.11 .50 9.98 8.22 .40
9 5.60 6.50 .65 5.98 7.30 .66 6.13 7.80 .39 3.05 4.00 .09 7.93 8.80 .53
10 6.19 12.36 .002* 7.00 13.43 .001* 6.72 13.36 .002* 4.11 6.21 .02 8.42 15.14 .07
11 5.05 5.89 .50 5.85 6.44 .97 5.59 6.44 .75 3.49 4.00 .65 7.54 8.44 .58
12 7.11 10.15 .01 8.19 11.39 .02 8.11 11.77 .006 4.19 6.15 .006 8.00 9.54 .28
*Reaches significance at individual a 5 .004.
LANGUAGE AND DISFLUENCY 197

pears that utterance length and syntactic complexity were related to the occur-
rence of normal disfluencies for only a small subgroup of these normally flu-
ent children.

Utterance Length, Syntactic Complexity, and Speech Fluency

To determine whether the combination of utterance length and syntactic com-
plexity can predict the likelihood that a specific utterance will contain a disflu-
ency, discriminant function analyses were computed for each child’s conver-
sational speech sample. The fluency of the utterance (disfluent or fluent) was
entered into the model as the discrete outcome variable, and the predictor vari-
ables included utterance length measured in morphemes and clausal constitu-
ents as well as syntactic complexity measured by the DSS score. Utterance
length measured in words and in syllables were not included in the discrimi-
nant functions because of the strong correlations between utterance length in
words, syllables, and morphemes reported above. Length in morphemes was
selected because this measure seemed to differentiate between fluent and dis-
fluent utterances for a slightly higher percentage of subjects in the individual
analyses reported above.
Before the calculation of the discriminant functions, each subject’s data for
utterance length and syntactic complexity were reviewed for the presence of
univariate and multivariate outliers. Univariate outliers were defined as items
with z-scores greater than 3.29 (p , .001) for any of the three variables in the
model. Multivariate outliers were defined as values with Mahalanobis dis-
tances (i.e., the difference between each individual score and the centroid for
the entire group of scores, excluding that score itself) with significance levels
of p , .001. Analyses revealed no univariate or multivariate outliers; how-
ever, some outside values were identified that did not meet the criteria for out-
liers presented above. Analyses also revealed that the distribution of several
variables was nonnormal; however, the discriminant function analysis proce-
dure is typically considered to be robust to nonnormality, provided that this is
due to skewness and not outliers, and provided that the sample size is suffi-
ciently large (Tabachnik & Fidell, 1996). Given that outliers were not identi-
fied and that the number of disfluent utterances was sufficiently large for
those few subjects with nonnormal distributions, it was determined that it was
acceptable to conduct the discriminant analyses on these subjects’ speech
samples.
Thus, a discriminant function analysis was completed for each of the 12
subjects’ speech samples and tested with a Bonferroni-adjusted significance
level of a 5 .004 (overall significance level of 12 analyses of a 5 .05). Table
3 summarizes the results from this discriminant analysis, including (1) the ca-
nonical correlation for the best-fit discriminant function, (2) the multivariate
F-test and significance level, (3) the discriminant function coefficients (load-
198 J. S. YARUSS, R. M. NEWMAN, and T. FLORA

ings) for the variables in the model (number of clausal constituents, number of
morphemes, and DSS score), (4) the percent of utterances correctly classified
by the discriminant function based on a jackknifed classification matrix, and
(5) a Chi-square test evaluating whether the model could classify utterances as
better than a chance level. For 10 out of 12 subjects (83.3%), the number of
clausal constituents in the utterance received the highest loading in the dis-
criminant functions. Utterance length in morphemes received the highest
loading for the other two subjects (16.7%). Syntactic complexity, represented
by DSS scores, appeared to add little to the discriminant functions for any of
these 12 subjects. Multivariate significance tests suggested that the discrimi-
nant functions could reliably classify the data for six out of 12 subjects (50%);
however, these tests reached the strict Bonferroni-corrected significant level
(a 5 .004) for only one out of 12 subjects (8.3%). Finally, discriminant func-
tions were able to correctly categorize between 52% and 78% of subjects’ ut-
terances as fluent or disfluent in a classification matrix. Several of these clas-
sifications appeared to be above chance levels; however, only one reached
Bonferroni-adjusted significance levels (for Subject 6; x2 5 8.13; p 5 .004).

DISCUSSION
The purpose of this study was to determine whether normally fluent children
produce more speech disfluencies on longer, more syntactically complex ut-
terances in spontaneous conversational speech. This analysis was designed to
test some of the basic tenets of current theories of stuttering that suggest, di-
rectly or indirectly, that certain aspects of language formulation play a pri-
mary role as a source factor for the occurrence of stuttering within a given ut-
terance. Previous research has revealed significant relationships between
utterance length, syntactic complexity, and stuttering in the conversational
speech of children who do stutter, though there have been no similar analyses
of conversational speech in children who do not stutter. Although the extent to
which results obtained with normally fluent children’s more typical speech
disfluencies can be extended to explain the less typical speech disfluencies ex-
hibited by children who stutter is not entirely clear, current language-based
theories do postulate a similar mechanism for explaining disfluencies in the
two populations. Thus, a greater understanding of the relationship between
language factors and normally fluent children’s production of disfluencies
should provide one means for evaluating the basic tenets of current theories.
This study was designed to supplement earlier work on the imitated and mod-
eled utterances of children who do not stutter by examining whether normally
fluent children exhibit more disfluencies on longer or more complex conver-
sational utterances.
The present finding that disfluent conversational utterances had a higher
average length and complexity than fluent conversational utterances is quite
Table 3. Summary of the Discriminant Analyses for classifying whether an utterance was fluent or disfluent based on the utterance length in

LANGUAGE AND DISFLUENCY

clausal constituents and morphemes and the syntactic complexity as measured by the DSS
Discriminant Function Coefficient
Subject Canonical Multivariate F Number of clausal Number of Percent correctly Chi-square
number correlation (p-value) constituents morphemes DSS classified (p-value)
1 0.5 5.01 0.52 0.21 20.08 73 7.17
(.004) (.007)
2 0.28 1.28 0.47 20.603 0.09 60 1.92
(.29) (.16)
3 0.36 2.27 0.12 20.2 20.14 70 4.16
(.09) (.04)
4 0.25 .98 0.55 0.21 20.10 62 .51
(.41) (.47)
5 0.41 2.94 0.15 20.03 0.13 63 1.36
(.04) (.20)
6 0.47 4.37 0.31 20.03 0.15 78 8.13
(.009) (.004)
7 0.4 2.86 0.73 20.04 0.05 70 3.00
(.05) (.08)
8 0.33 1.86 0.15 20.5 0.16 65 1.68
(.15) (.19)
9 0.35 2.16 1.009 0.06 20.16 66 .60
(.11) (.44)
10 0.46 3.98 0.09 1.11 20.23 74 4.92
(.01) (.03)
11 0.14 .31 0.4 0.23 20.04 52 2.56
(.82) (.11)
12 0.44 3.71 0.55 0.03 20.05 76 5.94

199
(.02) (.01)
200 J. S. YARUSS, R. M. NEWMAN, and T. FLORA

consistent with findings of earlier studies on imitated and modeled utterances

(Gordon & Luper, 1989; Gordon et al., 1986; Haynes & Hood, 1978;
McLaughlin & Cullinan, 1989; Pearl & Bernthal, 1980; Bernstein Ratner &
Sih, 1987). Findings are also consistent with the results of studies on the con-
versational speech of children who stutter (Gaines et al., 1991; Logan & Con-
ture, 1995, 1997; Yaruss, 1999). Bernstein Ratner and Sih (1987) pointed out
that the analysis of a broad range of sentence structures may be necessary in
order to fully illuminate the relationship between syntactic complexity and
speech fluency. The nature of the elicitation task (imitation or modeling ver-
sus conversational speech) is important, therefore, because children may not
exhibit the same wide range of syntactic structures in conversational speech as
they do in structured imitation or modeling tasks (Bernstein Ratner & Sih,
1987; e.g., Gordon et al., 1986). As noted above, children have been shown to
exhibit more disfluencies when imitating or modeling passive sentences (Pearl
& Bernthal, 1980); however, the present sample of 600 conversational utter-
ances produced by 12 normally fluent children contained only one example of
a passive sentence. Furthermore, the use of spontaneous conversational
speech samples does not provide the opportunity to control for variables such
as lexical retrieval or time pressures, which may also play a significant role in
determining the likelihood that speech disfluencies will occur on a given utter-
ance. Such factors may also play a role in indicating the underlying reason for
the disfluency in the context of language formulation; however, due to the
lower number of disfluencies produced by normally fluent children, analyses
of individual types of disfluencies could not be meaningfully conducted in the
present study. Accordingly, it seems that the clearest picture of these relation-
ships will be found by considering information from both elicited speech and
spontaneous speech samples produced by both children who stutter and chil-
dren who do not stutter to determine whether and how linguistic variables are
related to the likelihood that children will produce speech disfluencies.
Nevertheless, individual analyses of these 12 subjects’ 50-utterance speech
samples were not consistent with groups findings for all subjects. Specifically,
a significant difference in length or complexity between fluent and disfluent
utterances was found for only two to three of the 12 subjects (depending upon
the specific measure of length being considered and the significance level se-
lected). This finding is remarkably consistent with Gaines et al.’s (1991) study
of the conversational speech of young children who stutter. They, too, exam-
ined average DSS scores in fluent versus disfluent utterances and found sig-
nificant differences for group data. They then compared fluent and disfluent
utterances in each subject’s speech sample individually, just as in the present
investigation. Their analyses revealed that eight out of 12 subjects exhibited
significant differences between fluent and disfluent utterances in terms of ut-
terance length, and six out of 12 subjects exhibited significant differences in
terms of DSS scores. Interestingly, Gaines et al. decided not to employ a Bon-
LANGUAGE AND DISFLUENCY 201

ferroni correction for multiple comparisons to adjust their significance levels.

Their rationale for this decision was that they were simply trying to verify that
no single subject or small group of subjects was disproportionally represented
in the data and would therefore have been responsible for the observed differ-
ence. Nevertheless, if they had used this statistical correction, as the present
authors did in the analyses reported above, then the number of subjects who
exhibited significant differences between fluent and disfluent utterances
would have dropped to only three out of 12 (25%) for utterance length and one
out of 12 (8.3%) for syntactic complexity—very similar to the results reported
in the present study. (A similar discrepancy between group and individual
analyses was reported for the 75-utterance conversational speech samples of
children whose stutter was examined in Yaruss, 1999). Thus, it seems clear
that disfluent utterances are likely, on average, to be longer and more complex
than fluent utterances. It also seems clear, however, that this relationship
holds true only for a subset of children. In any case, it appears that the rela-
tionships between utterance length, syntactic complexity, and speech fluency
are not as direct as has been suggested in some recent theories about stut-
tering.
There are a number of possible explanations for the apparent discrepancy
between group and individual analyses. First, the lack of statistical signifi-
cance for the within-subject comparisons may be at least partially due to the
unequal sample sizes between fluent and disfluent utterances (see Table 1).
One way to correct for this is to analyze equal numbers of fluent and disfluent
utterances drawn from larger speech samples (e.g., Logan & Conture, 1997).
Because of the relatively low frequency of disfluencies in normally fluent
children’s conversational speech, however, it will be necessary for the original
speech samples to be quite large. Also, because different children exhibit dif-
ferent average disfluency frequencies, the size of the speech samples from
which the matched sets of utterances are drawn will likely differ from one
child to another. Finally, the stringent significance levels necessary for multiple
comparisons of individual subjects’ data also places some additional require-
ments on the statistical analyses that do not affect the group average comparisons.
Another explanation, particularly important for theory and treatment in
childhood stuttering, is simply that the relationship between linguistic com-
plexity and speech disfluency is only apparent for a subset of children. Or,
such a relationship may be apparent only in children who stutter—a possibil-
ity that the current study of normally fluent children cannot directly address.
Certainly, all children differ in their linguistic (and motoric) abilities, so it
seems quite plausible that some children are more likely to be affected by
variations in linguistic complexity than other children. An inspection of the
DSS values and mean utterance length measures for these 12 subjects (see Ta-
ble 1), compared with the results of the discriminant function analyses (see
Table 3), does not reveal any obvious patterns for distinguishing which chil-
202 J. S. YARUSS, R. M. NEWMAN, and T. FLORA

dren were likely to exhibit a relationship between syntactic complexity, utter-

ance length, and speech (dis)fluency. In other words, variations in these 12
children’s language skills did not seem to be related to the likelihood that they
would exhibit a significant discriminant function. Still, the evaluation of indi-
vidual differences in children’s ability has recently received increasing atten-
tion in the stuttering literature (Watkins & Yairi, 1997; Yaruss, 1999). Ac-
cordingly, a better understanding of the factors that affect some, but not all,
children, should be quite helpful in furthering our understanding of the rela-
tionship between children’s language and speech fluency.
Another issue that has recently been discussed in the stuttering literature is
determining which factor—utterance length or syntactic complexity—is the
more important for determining the likelihood that an utterance will be disflu-
ent. To a certain extent, it is somewhat artificial to attempt to separate utter-
ance length from syntactic complexity in conversational speech, as these two
aspects of language are strongly related (Bernstein Ratner & Sih, 1987). Inter-
estingly, however, present analyses of both group and individual data indi-
cated that DSS scores and utterance length were not significantly correlated.
In part, this reflects the fact that the DSS examines only certain aspects of syn-
tactic complexity, and ignores others (e.g., number of main or embedded
clauses in a sentence, elaboration of noun or verb phrases, etc.). However, this
dissociation between length and complexity also suggests that it may be possi-
ble to identify which aspect more directly affects children’s fluency. For ex-
ample, Bernstein Ratner and Sih (1987) concluded that syntactic complexity
was more important than utterance length, based on their finding that their
ranking of syntactic complexity was more strongly correlated with the percent
of disfluent utterances on an imitation task than their ranking of predicted ut-
terance length. On the other hand, Logan and Conture (1995) concluded that
utterance length was the more important factor, based on findings that utter-
ance length differed between stuttering children’s fluent and disfluent utter-
ances, while syntactic complexity did not meaningfully differentiate fluent
and stuttered utterances. Present findings closely mirror those of Logan and
Conture in this respect. The discriminant analyses conducted in the present
study revealed that DSS scores added little to the discriminant functions’ abil-
ity to predict the likelihood that an utterance would be disfluent. Thus, present
data suggest that utterance length is the more important factor. Nevertheless,
utterance length measured in clausal constituents was more heavily weighted
than utterance length in morphemes for the majority of subjects. Because ut-
terance length in clausal constituents is a measure of length that is based on
syntactic units, it still seems that the combination of both utterance length and
syntactic complexity is important in determining the likelihood that stuttering
will occur on a given utterance.
Finally, these results have implications for current theories of stuttering
that implicate various aspects of language formulation in the production of
LANGUAGE AND DISFLUENCY 203

speech disfluencies (e.g., Karniol, 1995; Perkins et al., 1991; Postma & Kolk,
1997; Wingate, 1988). In general, these theories focus on some sort of deficit
in the phonological encoding process as the primary factor leading to fluency
breakdown. This factor was not assessed in this study of conversational
speech; however, the theories also suggest, directly or indirectly, that aspects
of linguistic formulation such as syntactic complexity or utterance length
should play a role in determining the likelihood that the phonological encod-
ing problem will ultimately lead to the production of a speech disfluency. For
example, the neuropsycholinguistic theory (Perkins et al., 1991) appears to
suggest that so-called “linguistic disfluency” is more likely when demands on
the language formulation system are increased. Although the specific nature
of these demands is not fully understood, it can be argued that longer or more
syntactically complex utterances result in increased sentence processing de-
mands (e.g., Levelt, 1989; see also Yaruss, 1999), perhaps through increased
working memory requirements (Bosshardt, 1995). The present findings con-
firm that for some children, increased utterance length or syntactic complexity
do appear to be associated with an increased likelihood of disfluency. Further-
more, this relationship does hold for the planning of individual utterances (i.e.,
on an utterance-by-utterance basis). Still, the fact that the prediction levels
were not 100% (one would not expect them to be), combined with the fact that
some subjects did not exhibit such a relationship, suggest that other factors
also play a role in determining the likelihood of disfluencies and that a com-
plete theory should encompass other aspects of speech/language production in
addition to linguistic complexity.
In sum, results from the present study confirm prior reports that disfluent
utterances are, on average, likely to be longer and more complicated than flu-
ent utterances in normally fluent children’s conversational speech. Present
findings extend previous research on normally fluent children’s speech by
highlighting the importance of individual differences between subjects and
provide a means for evaluating the suggestion in current theories that the
mechanism for disfluent speech is similar in children who stutter and children
who do not stutter. Of course, additional research will be necessary to assess
the degree to which such relationships are apparent in the conversational
speech of children who stutter. In addition, present findings highlight the im-
portance of considering differences on an utterance-by-utterance basis, rather
than only comparing averages across subjects’ utterances. Finally, because the
measures of linguistic complexity examined in this study could not adequately
explain the occurrence of disfluencies in children’s conversational speech, it
seems clear that factors other than linguistic complexity, such as various as-
pects of utterance timing (e.g., speaking rate, response latency; e.g., Logan &
Conture, 1995; Yaruss, 1997b) or other aspects of the conversational interac-
tion, such as pragmatics (e.g., Weiss & Zebrowski, 1992) are also likely to
play a role in determining the likelihood that a given utterance will contain a
204 J. S. YARUSS, R. M. NEWMAN, and T. FLORA

speech disfluency. Future research could further our understanding of the pa-
rameters influencing the occurrence of disfluencies by considering various
combinations of these different factors and extending the methodology to ex-
amine relationships in both normally fluent and stuttering children’s elicited
and conversational speech.

The authors are grateful to: Nina Capone and Susan T. Mulhern for their assis-
tance with DSS measures; Nan Bernstein Ratner, Ken Logan, Karla McGre-
gor, and Cynthia Thompson for discussions about the analysis of syntactic
complexity in children’s conversational speech; and Steve Zecker for discus-
sions about discriminant analysis. Portions of this analysis were completed as
part of the third author’s undergraduate honors thesis at Northwestern Univer-
sity (NU) and portions of the manuscript were prepared while the first author
was on the faculty at NU.

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