Stuttering: The Linguistic Structure Of The Spanish Language

Stuttering exists across linguistic and cultural groups in both monolingual and bilingual speakers. In the United States, diversity is the new majority made up of a kaleidoscope of racial and ethnic minorities. Inherent in these cultural groups are personal attitudes toward disability, communicative disorders, and stuttering. Culture and language are closely intertwined as they represent ways in how individuals perceive, understand, and interact with the world. With this rise in ethnically diverse populations, the numbers of culturally diverse persons who stutter will be increasingly represented in the speech-language pathologist's caseload. As a result, it is critical attempts to embrace multicultural and linguistic differences become central …show more content…
The effects of increased length and syntactic complexity on fluency have been documented and suggest that increased processing demands may lead to increased rates of stuttering. Psycholinguistic theories of stuttering indicate that syntactic, lexical, phonological, or suprasegmental aspects of speech production may contribute to the expression of stuttering (Watson, et.al, 2011). The connection between stuttering and the linguistic aspect of language should be examined in order to identify underlying characteristics that contribute to increased …show more content…
In Spanish, there is an increased word length and highly inflected noun and verb systems when compared to English. In Spanish, two to three-syllable words make up 90% of Spanish tokens. Conjunctions, articles, and prepositions are multisyllabic in Spanish, where in English they are single syllable words (Watson, et.al, 2011). There are also multiple inflectional affixes with a wide range of syntactic and semantic functions. For example, the definite female or male plural article requires agreement for both gender and number making it more linguistically complex. This increased complexity requires encoding therefore taxing the system and making it more susceptible to error. Sentence structure also differs due to sentential context and inflected verb forms. In Spanish, verbs have different endings that provide enough information to identify the subject of the sentences. For this reason pronouns are omitted resulting in verb initiated utterances leading to increased disfluencies at the beginning of utterances in Spanish (Watson et al, 2011). It is of clinical important to conduct further investigations between linguistic and grammatical complexity and their relationship to fluency to determine the degree of stuttering between languages in bilingual speakers. Knowing the level of severity