It is speculated that children will experience developmental linguistic delays at some point due to their muscle and motor plans not working as quickly as their brains. While they are learning speech, they are also developmentally mastering other skills (walking, potty training, motor skills, etc.) The origin of stuttering is not yet fully understood but parents/adults can mitigate the risk of developmental dysfluency by reducing the conversational demands on their child. Modeling slow, smooth speech and acknowledging the demanding and complex nature of learning language can help. Background
Speech is a complicated achievement that involves a series of cognitive, linguistic, sensorimotor and auditory processes that generate an in-depth understanding of language and speech. As children grow up their language and vocabulary grows with them. However, as this happens it is possible that the child might begin to demonstrate forms of disfluencies in their speech as they struggle to get words out when they are engaged in conversation or speaking in general. Preschool children usually go through a period of dysfluency as they attempt to learn linguistic and speech skills. About 10% of these children will experience a speech or language delay that is serious enough to benefit from early referral and assessment by a speech language pathologist. Normal disfluency begins during a childs intensive language learning years and resolves on its own as the child undergoes growth and development. This is considered the normal phase of language development.
In comparison, stuttering can be seen as a process where a word appears to become "stuck," and the person may grimace, jerk the head or neck as he struggles to overcome the stutter. Characteristics
Characteristics of developmental dysfluency include:
Repeating phrases (e.g. "he ate-he ate my cookie)
Use of filler words (um, uh, like, ah, etc)
No tension of physical inability and struggle to speak
Lack of problematic behaviors when speaking
No negative reaction or frustration
Appearance of dysfluencies only last less than 6 monthsChildren with normal dysfluency tend to have stuttering difficulties that come and go. Generally this is during preschool years and the problem normally ceases altogether by the time a child starts school. Everyone experiences periods of dysfluency - normal speech patterns include about 2-4% interruptions in flow or fluency. Revisions, word and phrase repetitions and interjections are all common in children speech (see typical dysfluencies below) whereas; sound and syllable repetition, sound prolongation and broken words are much more atypical. Typical Dysfluency Examples
The term dysfluency is used to describe normal irregularities that occur during speech. As children begin to learn how to communicate with language some will experience issues between the ages of 2-6. These can include:
Phrase revisions or abandoned utterances ("Im want. Can I have...")
Hesitations between words ("Can you give me ... blocks")
Multisyllabic word repetitions ("Gimme, Wanna ... etc)
Phrase repetitions ("I need I need I need ... a hug")
Interjections/Interruptions in sentence structure ("Youre ummm, really funny")Children are learning language and linguistics among many other things.