Assessment of the speech disfluencies severity in preschool children with stuttering using sentence modeling and sentence imitation tasks

Linguistic factors can decrease or increase the children’s speech disfluencies. One of these factors is the type of linguistic tasks presented to the child. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of two tasks of sentence imitation and sentence modeling on severity of speech disfluencies in preschool children with stuttering. This cross-sectional descriptive-analytic study performed on 58 children with stuttering (29 subjects with mild stuttering and 29 subjects with moderate stuttering) and on 58 children with fluent speech aged 4-6 years old. The severity of speech disfluencies was measured by two separate tasks (sentence imitation and sentence modeling), and the results of two tasks were compared. The mean stuttering severity score in boys with moderate stuttering in two tasks of sentence imitation and sentence modeling was 23.79±1.26 & 29.00±1.87 respectively and significant difference was observed (P=0.004). The mean stuttering severity score in girls with moderate stuttering was 25.27±1.93 & 33.18±2.32 respectively and significant difference was observed (P=0.007). The score of speech disfluencies in both sexes of non-stutter children and mild stuttering had no significant difference between two tasks (P>0.05). In preschool children with mild stuttering and peer non-stutters, performing two tasks of sentence imitation and sentence modeling could not increase the severity of stuttering. In preschool children with moderate stuttering, doing the task of sentence modeling increased the stuttering severity score. It is suggested that speech therapists apply the findings of this study to develop linguistic tasks with various levels of difficulty for children with stuttering.