Linguistic disfluencies in Russian-speaking typically and atypically developing children: individual variability in different contexts

ABSTRACT

Disfluency in children and adults seems to occur like errors of speech but, at the same time, is an essential feature of spontaneous (unprepared) speech. The present study aimed to evaluate linguistic disfluencies in typically and atypically developing Russian-speaking children from the perspective of the dynamic adaptive model of self-monitoring in speech production. The study collected four language samples from 10 six-year-old children with developmental language disorder and 14 typically developing peers: two storytelling tasks, structured conversation, and a play argument. After transcribing audio-recordings and marking linguistic disfluencies, the authors conducted structured distributional analysis. The distribution of several indexes of disfluency was estimated to assess the prevalence and profiles of different (sub)types of disfluencies. The disfluency rate statistics were similar between the typically developing children and children with developmental language disorder. The distributional indexes score showed that tasks significantly impacted the rate of different (sub)types of disfluencies. Task-related patterns in a set of the distributional indexes significantly distinguished the groups. Thus, changes in the disfluency profile related to different external factors, as a sign of a flexibility of an adaptive self-monitoring system, may be limited in children with developmental language disorder.

KEYWORDS:

• Preschool age
• linguistic disfluencies
• Russian
• developmental language disorder
• discourse genre

Acknowledgments

The study was funded by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (grant 19-29-14078). We are grateful to the editor of this volume and the two anonymous reviewers, for their helpful suggestions and comments on previous versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/02699206.2023.2176786.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Russian Foundation for Fundamental Investigations [19-29-14078].