Analysing The Relationship Between Neighborhood Density And Frequency Of Stuttering In Speech Of Persian Language Children who Stutter

Many studies have shown that stuttering is influenced by various linguistic factors in different ways. This research is aimed at investigating the effect of neighborhood density (number of words that are phonologically similar to a target word) on stuttering frequency in Persian speaking children who stutter (CWS).

This study was carried out on 18 Persian language CWS ranging in age from 4 to 8 year old in Tehran selecting by convenience sampling. Neighborhood density evaluated by two tasks which designed by researchers: 29 picture naming and 8 sentence repetition samples. Stimuli were selected from both CVC and CVCC syllable structures with similar frequencies of occurrence and with the same number in both dense and sparse group.

The result indicated that among 576 stimuli obtained from participants 45.83% of stuttered words are sparse and 54.16% are dense. So stuttered words were fewer in sparse words than dense words but difference is not significant (p<0.05).

The result seems to suggest that neighborhood density caused more competitions between similar phonological words, so sparse words are presumably more difficult,less accurate and slower to access. Then it makes increasing frequency of stuttering.