Verbal fluency, lexical production and socio-economic characteristics in a sample of 24-months old children with a family history of stuttering, in relation to possible stuttering onset and final recovery or persistence

The research project «Phonetic indexes predictive of persistent stuttering in preschool children» (CNR, RSTL n. 995), examines 40 subjects, divided in 26 children who have never started to stutter, and 14 who developed stuttering. As to the latter, 4 have became persistent and 10 recovered spontaneously. At 24 months of age, the Disfluency Profile (Yairi and Ambrose, 2005) was calculated in a representative sample of connected speech. The occurrences of Stuttering-Like Disfluencies and the occurrences of Other Disfluencies (equally common among stutterers and not stutterers) were counted. Lexical age (MacArthur-Bates, CDI) and socioeconomic score of parents (SES) were also obtained. The main result shows that future stutterers produce more SLD (3.01% vs 0.75%) and have smaller vocabulary size than future non-stutterers.