A new study has shown that young children who stammer may be more emotionally sensitive, and have greater difficulty regulating their feelings, than children who don't stammer. Findings suggest that these may contribute to the difficulties these children have establishing reasonably fluent speech and language.

The research team was led by Edward Conture, who said parents should not feel guilty about any role emotional control might play in stuttering. "What we're trying to find out is how emotions contribute to the onset and development of stuttering in children," Edward Conture told The Washington Post newspaper.

"There is no evidence that parents cause their children to stutter," Conture said. "The current findings tell us this is something we should look at."

The study involved 111 preschoolers between 3 and 5 years. Parents of 65 children who stutter completed a standardised and widely used behavioral questionnaire about their child's reactions to various situations and the ease with which they refocused their attention. Parents of 56 children who do not stutter completed the same inventory. Researchers assessed all children's language abilities.

Conture said that an analysis of the two groups yielded statistically significant differences in three areas: Stutterers were about 25 percent more reactive than non-stutterers and 25 percent less able to regulate their reactions to everyday situations. They were 33 percent less able to refocus their attention when aroused - such as if another child grabbed a toy they were playing with - and were more likely to become fixated on the situation.

Conture said future studies will measure those differences more precisely using brain wave monitoring and other measurements that do not reply on reports from parents.

Barry Guitar, a professor of communication sciences at the University of Vermont, said he thought the study, at Vanderbilt University, might help answer one of the questions he hears most often as a speech pathologist: "Why does the problem ebb and flow unpredictably?"

Relation of emotional reactivity and regulation to childhood stuttering is published in the Journal of Communication Disorders Volume 39, Issue 6 doi:10.1016/j.jcomdis.2005.12.004

From the Autumn 2006 edition of Speaking Out, page 12