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 inTurkish children. The participants were 56 Turkish speaking, monolingual children withstuttering 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 articulationabilities, age and sex. The results revealed that the group effect (Wald χ2 (1) = 215.64, p< 0.001, b = 0.14) and the sex effect (Wald χ2 (1) = 215.64, p = 0.001, b = 0.74) wassignificant in all age groups. Girls who stutter performed significantly better compared toboys in the preschool age group on articulation abilities while there was no sex effect inthe school age group. There was a correlation between family history of stuttering andarticulation abilities (r = 0.321, p = 0.001) and, between time passed since the onset ofstuttering and the articulation abilities (r = 0.342, p = 0.001) in the stuttering group. Thecorrelation 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 differencesbetween groups regards to articulation abilities increasing with age.