Announcing 'Stammering Research' - Stammering Research - UCL

Stammering Research. Vol. 1.
Bilingual issues in stammering intervention: an exploratory study
Samina Ghazi and Robin Lickley
Queen Margaret University College, Edinburgh
Bilingual issues in intervention for childhood stammering are relatively unaddressed in the literature
but are in need of basic research to support and increase the knowledge-base necessary to inform
Speech and Language Therapists. SLTs working in Bilingual Services with dysfluent children have
reported many problems in implementing interventions. This is not only because of an inability of the
service to cope with a wide variety of languages, but can often stem from differing cultural
backgrounds. So far, most of the issues raised can only be aired anecdotally, as there is no research data
to support any claims. This pilot project begins to explore some of the issues, in a case study of one
bilingual children who stammers. The Bilingual Service at Yorkhill NHS Trust in Glasgow has a large
caseload of bilingual children who stammer, and it is there that data for this project was gathered.
This study examined the speech of a 6 year old bilingual boy from Glasgow in both English and
Urdu. The boy’s parents were both born in the UK and both Urdu and English are spoken in the home.
The boy took part in 4 recording sessions with the first author, each of around 25-30 minutes and
each involving a variety of games with description and discussion of pictures. The language used in
two sessions was English and in the other two, Urdu. The language samples were transcribed and
annotated for dysfluency using signal processing and annotation tools (SFS: Howell & Huckvale,
2004). Word counts, utterance lengths (in words and syllables) and tokens and types of dysfluency
were analysed
A total of 1524 words produced by the child were transcribed (983 English, 541 Urdu). These
yielded a total of 386 dysfluencies (205 in English and 181 in the Urdu dialogues).
The analyses indicate that, unlike Mean Length of Utterance (MLU: English 4.3, Urdu 3.8 syllables
per utterance), overall dysfluency rate (in stammering events per hundred syllables: %SS) was much
higher in Urdu than English (25.3 vs. 18.4 %SS). Types of dysfluency were relatively similar in both
the languages except for blocking, which was noted in Urdu utterances only. There were consistencies
in the repetition and prolongation of some sounds despite the differences and inconsistencies in both
languages. A variety of dysfluent hesitation sounds were also observed in both languages. Predictably,
word-initial dysfluencies were most common but word-final dysfluencies were also found in both
languages.
For this child, it appears that there may be a negative correlation between his ability in the two
languages and dysfluency rates – his dysfluency rate was higher in the language in which he seemed
slightly less proficient (Urdu). Despite this quantitative difference, qualitatively, the child appeared to
be dysfluent in more or less the same way in the two languages.
The study as a whole also highlights some of the complexities of the problem of handling bilingual
cases in a Speech and Language Therapy clinic. One of the main issues is that the standardised clinical
tests that are available for assessment of the speech and language abilities of children are not
necessarily adaptable to children who speak a non-standard accent of English (in this case Glaswegian)
let alone to those who are also bilingual. For example, the rough comparison of MLU between the
languages is at best only indicative, given that there is no norm available for the child’s Urdu dialect,
let alone a Glasgow bilingual version of the dialect, nor for the child’s dialect of English. Additionally,
it is clearly impossible to view the ‘bilingual population’ as anything other than extremely
heterogeneous. Initially, 4 children were recorded for the study, each with different linguistic,
educational, social and cultural backgrounds and with a resultant variability in the child’s exposure to
and proficiency in their languages (3 of the children did not display any stammering behaviour in the
recording sessions).
Any more extensive study must pay heed to all of these factors.
Reference
Howell, P. and Huckvale, M. 2004. Facilities to assist people to research into stammered speech.
Stammering Research, 1, 130-242.
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