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Stuttering and Language Complexity

Language complexity refers to the degree of difficulty associated with the linguistic structure and content of a sentence or a set of sentences. Sentences can be linguistically complex in syntax or grammar, in vocabulary, in phonological structure, or, more generally, in communicative demand. Sentences vary in length and motoric complexity, which interacts with linguistic complexity. For children who stutter, utterances of greater linguistic complexity, especially syntactic complexity, tend to be produced with more stuttering and more typical disfluency (e.g., pauses, interjections, revisions). Even children who do not stutter tend to produce more typical disfluencies on syntactically complex utterances than on simpler ones. Understanding the relationship between stuttering and language complexity in general is important from a theoretical perspective; many theories that attempt to explain the occurrence and variability of stuttering include language complexity as an important variable. Understanding this relationship is important from a clinical perspective, as well, in that, in early childhood, fluctuations in stuttering over time may correspond to the development of various language milestones for individual children. This entry provides an overview of the relationship between stuttering and language complexity, including how factors such as communicative demand and length of utterance come into play and emphasizing the clinical relevance of understanding how language complexity may impact stuttering.

Measuring Language Complexity

Language complexity can be measured in many different ways. For example, lexical complexity can be established through word-level analyses by determining a word’s typical age of acquisition, its frequency within the language, or its concreteness versus abstractness. Words that develop later, those that are less frequent within a language, and those that are more abstract are considered more complex, posing a greater linguistic challenge in language production. Phonological complexity can be measured by taking into account the motoric complexity of phonemes, their age of acquisition, and the complexity of phoneme sequences, including syllable shape and length. Phonological complexity of a word can also be measured through the analysis of the number of words that are phonologically similar to the target word. Words that have many phonological neighbors (e.g., hat, which is similar to many other words) are generally considered less complex from a speech planning and production perspective, although differing views have been expressed in this regard. Finally, syntactic or grammatical complexity can be measured by the length of linguistic units (e.g., mean length of utterance in morphemes or words, mean preverb length, etc.), the amount and type of subordination (i.e., the extent to which subordinate clauses are present within a language sample), or the presence of specific grammatical structures within a language sample. Formal analyses of grammatical structures include Lee’s Developmental Sentence Scoring and Scarborough’s Index of Productive Syntax. Later-developing linguistic structures are presumed to represent a greater linguistic challenge.

Effects of Linguistic Complexity on Stuttering Across Development

Syntax

A range of studies, with a few exceptions, have found that, in the preschool years and into the school-age years, stuttering and typical disfluency are most likely to occur on utterances of a greater syntactic complexity. These studies have varied in their sentence elicitation procedures from imitation tasks to modeled sentence tasks to spontaneous language, with complexity effects observed across elicitation types. At the word level, stuttering is more likely to occur on function words (e.g., articles, prepositions, pronouns, conjunctions) than on content words (e.g., nouns, verbs, adjectives) for children who stutter, a finding which, in part, may be confounded by the fact that stuttering typically occurs at the beginnings of sentences, and the beginnings of sentences often contain function words (e.g., a and the). In contrast, adults tend to stutter more often on content words. Function words convey grammatical information, whereas content words convey meaning. Thus, in early language development, function words may represent a greater linguistic challenge than content words.

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