Effect of phonological and morphological factors on speech disfluencies of Kannada speaking preschool children who stutter

Purpose: Empirical investigations have revealed a strong association between linguistic factors and stuttering, specifically phonological and morphological factors. However, the effect of these factors is suggested to vary across languages owing to the differences in their linguistic structure. Further, the trend is found to vary between AWS and CWS. Literature in this regard is scarce in the Kannada language, particularly in children. Hence, the study was driven by the need to understand the effect of phonological and morphological factors on stuttering in Kannada speaking CWS. Method: Spontaneous speech samples were obtained from twenty Kannada speaking preschool CWS with a confirmed diagnosis of stuttering by an experienced speech-language pathologist. The recorded samples were transcribed, and disfluencies were marked. Further, the stuttered words were analysed for phonological and morphological features. The phonological factors included were phoneme position in a word, phoneme type and word length. Morphological factors consisted of word class and word end inflectional morphology. The percentage of stuttering was calculated with respect to each of the factors mentioned above. Results: Phoneme in the initial position of a word and words beginning with consonants had a higher rate of stuttering. Word length, word class and word end inflections were found to have no significant effect on the rate of stuttering in CWS. Conclusion: Overall, current findings revealed that stuttering might manifest differently across languages varying in their linguistic structures.