3-4 years old boy with portrait isolated on white

Stuttering or transient developmental dysfluency

By Cristiano Antonino On Dec 8, 2022

The appearance of the first verbal dysfluencies at risk of becoming chronic (stuttering) is generally around three to six years of age, a period when the child makes a considerable effort to learn language

Stuttering and spontaneous regression

From the ‘nuclear domain’ of the word (stage of the word sentence. ‘bread’… instead of … ‘give me bread…’) around the age of three, the child faces the explosion of the sentence, and with compulsory schooling the expansion of vocabulary and syntax with the (scholastic) demand for an elaborate linguistic code as opposed to the personal restricted code.

According to the scholar L. Rustin in a 1992 study of a sample of 209 stuttering children, 95 per cent started before the age of 7, 27 per cent before the age of 3, and 5 per cent after the age of 7.

Consider how 40-70/80 % of boys who stutter regress naturally to normal fluency in adolescence, without any direct therapeutic intervention.

The relationship between this percentage and the possibility of the disorder becoming chronic, makes early intervention by a specialist and the prospect of in-depth preventive intervention professionally necessary against the common idea of a spontaneous regression, sometimes complicated by inappropriate interventions by the family and parental sphere emotionally involved with the subject.

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Early intervention not only concerns the early diagnosis of the symptom (stuttering, dysfluencies) but must also concern itself with its development over time

The results of our research confirm (in line with scholars such as Starweather and Conture) the presence of certain characteristic elements in the language of a child at risk (Table A) of future chronification of dysfluency (secondary stuttering, evolutionarily stable over time):

Phonetic ELEMENTS characteristic of LANGUAGE AT RISK

Dysfluencies reach more than 3/4%.

When in a series of 100 words about 28/30% of prolongations are detected out of the total number of difluencies presented.

When frequent repetitions of phonemes and syllables of the first word of the sentence are present.

Repetition of phonemes or syllables account for more than 1% of verbal interruptions (out of a total of about 200 syllables with communicative value).

When the loss of eye contact exceeds about 50% of the verbal report time.

The scholar Edmund Yairi states, in confirmation of the transitory nature of the logopathic picture, that it is necessary to wait about 20 months from the onset of verbal symptomatology in order to make a serious assessment between a true stuttering (chronic and stabilised) and a temporary, apparent and transitory stuttering.

These criteria intended more for research than for the clinic must in any case orient the specialist’s treatment of the disorder beyond subjective and reductive considerations.

We share with the international research orientation the need to take charge of the family when the subject’s restlessness and parental concern become negative factors for verbal development.

Emotional reactions are confirmed as criteria of great importance in the prevention of stuttering

The picture presented is not exhaustive of all the signs/symptoms that may allow the early signs of a child stuttering to be identified, but they are in their generality the most common.