Fluency and Disfluency, Typical

Typical speech is fluent, relative to speech affected by pathological conditions, yet it still contains frequent hesitations and self-repairs, referred to as disfluencies. It is important for speech pathologists to understand about typical fluency, about the causes of typical disfluencies and the forms that they take, and about the relationship between typical and pathological disfluency.

In this entry, the word disfluency refers to breaks in fluency in both typical and pathological cases. The word dysfluency is frequently used in the speech pathology literature. Some authors propose that this word be used to refer to disorders affecting fluency, rather than individual instances of breakdowns in fluency. One reason for this is that it can be difficult to distinguish a break in fluency that is due to a ...