Disfluent Utterances of Japanese Youth With Down's Syndrome

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the features of disfluent utterances of youth with Down's syndrome. It has been said that the prevalence of stuttering is higher in children and youth with Down's syndrome than in young people with other types of intellectual disabilities or without disabilities. However, to our knowledge, features of the disfluent utterances of children and youth with Down's syndrome have not been studied. In the present study, disfluent utterances of 20 youth with Down's syndrome (12 boys, 8 girls; average CA:15:6) were classified into 2 categories: stuttering-like disfluencies and disfluencies resembling those often observed in young people without Down's syndrome. The results were as follows: (1) Features of the disfluent utterances of the Japanese youth with Down's syndrome were more similar to those of youth who stutter than to those of youth without disabilities. (2) When the 20 participants were classified into 3 groups on the basis of the characteristics of their disfluencies: a stuttering group, a non-stuttering group, and a middle group, it was found that the stuttering group had a higher frequency of stuttering-like disfluencies than of ordinary disfluencies, and that the non-stuttering group had a higher frequency of ordinary disfluencies than of stuttering-like disfluencies. The middle group showed no difference in frequency between the two types of disfluency. (3) No difference was observed among the 3 groups in the frequency of ordinary disfluencies.