Journalof Speech and Hearing Research, Volume 35, 1230-1238, December 1992

Disfluencies in the Conversations of Young Children Who Stutter: Some Answers About Questions Amy L Weiss Patricia M. Zebrowski University of Iowa Iowa City Parents of children who stutter are often advised to reduce the number of questions they ask their children. Implicit in this advice is the assumption that children who stutter will be more disfluent when answering questions. This study assessed parent-child conversational speech for 8 parent-child pairs to determine the relative amounts of disfluency inthe child's responses to questions versus making assertions. Length and complexity of the children's utterances and the frequency of the parents' requests by level of demand were also evaluated. Results suggested that the responses made by the children to their parents' requests were significantly less likely to contain disfluencies than were their assertions. Also, longer and more complex utterances were more likely to contain disfluencies, regardless of their designation as assertions or responses. Parents were shown to favor request types of lower levels of demand in conversations. Requests posed with greater levels of demand were somewhat more likely to yield disfluent responses than were those at a lower demand level. KEY WORDS: difluencles, conversations, children, questions, communication

The Demands and Capacities (DC) model, recently proposed by Starkweather and his colleagues (Starkweather, 1987; Starkweather & Gottwald, 1990; Starkweather, Gottwald, & Halfond, 1990) and based on earlier work by Andrews and colleagues (Andrews, Craig, Feyer, Hoddinott, Howie, & Neilson, 1983), focuses attention on both the stuttering individual and the environment in which that individual functions to explain why stuttering develops and is perpetuated. The model takes into account the dynamic interplay of a speaker's abilities to maintain fluency when addressed by changing environmental requirements for fluent speech levied by combinations of linguistic, speech motor, cognitive, and social-emotional requisites. The essential premise of the model is that when a speaker's abilities to maintain fluency (capacities) are not equal to the environmental demands placed on him or her, disfluencies will result (Starkweather et al., 1990, p. 13). Elaborating on the model, Adams (1990) suggested that there is probably a great deal of variability in the population with regard to capacity for fluency as well as the personal demands on that capacity. This variability may account for why disfluent behavior is not always predictable across speakers and situations. He suggested, however, that it appears more likely that stuttering will be the outcome when children continuously experience situations in which their capacities for fluency have been insufficient to cope with the demands for fluency (p. 139). One of the demands that may impinge on an individual stutterer's capacity to maintain fluency is responding to questions (Starkweather, Gottwald, & Halfond, 1990, p. 18). This is not an isolated conclusion. In several areas of the stuttering literature, prescripted fluency-enhancing interaction patterns for parents with young children who stutter (Prins, 1983; Starkweather et al., 1990), descriptions of mothers' and fathers' speech to their young children who stutter (Langlois, Hanrahan, & © 1992, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association

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Weiss & Zebrowski: Disfluencies in Conversations

Inouye, 1986; Meyers, 1990), and explanations for the development and maintenance of disfluent behaviors (Nelson, 1986; Starkweather et al., 1990), authors conclude from research findings or otherwise speculate that question-asking by parents of stutterers is pervasive and may increase the likelihood that stuttering children will stutter. Invoking the Demands and Capacities model, question-asking can be viewed as one environmental agent of demand on the young stutterer or child at risk for stuttering. It may be because of this assumption that several investigators have recommended that parental questioning be avoided or at least curtailed. For example, Starkweather and his colleagues (1990) advocated calculating the numbers of questions asked by the parents of children who stutter during clinical evaluations, presumably so that this behavior can be assessed over time. Nelson (1986) suggested that parents reduce by half the number of questions that they ask their young children (p. 31). Langlois and her colleagues (1986) noted that the significantly greater propensity on the part of mothers of children who stutter to ask their children questions when compared with mothers of nonstuttering children probably placed the stutterers in a position of increased communication pressure. In another study, Meyers (1990) demonstrated that the mothers and fathers of her young subjects who stuttered produced more questions in conversations with their children than did their child's favorite peer, although not any more than each other. According to Starkweather et al. (1990), the demand on the young child to produce a fluent and intelligible response to a question asked by a conversational partner may exceed his or her capacity to do so (p. 18). Although this suggestion has been more prevalent in the literature pertaining to preschool children, it has also been speculated that frequent questioning by parents or teachers might exacerbate stuttering in school-aged children who stutter (Gregory, 1990). The clinical assumption that being questioned is detrimental to fluency maintenance has probably been an intuitive conclusion, based on common sense and some understanding of the demands that are part of the conversation process. The stutterer, aware that she or he has difficulty producing fluent speech, is perceived as being "put on the spot" when questioned. Not only does the respondent have to provide the interrogator with an answer that provides correct information, but the answer must be appropriate given the semantic constraint inherent in the question asked (Leach, 1972). That is, an appropriate answer to a "when" question necessitates providing a response containing a temporal segment, and to enhance the flow of the conversation, it should be the correct answer as well. There is also a time constraint imposed on answers to questions. In order to take a successful conversational turn when you have been asked a question, you must respond in a timely manner. Taking too much time to respond may endanger the status of the speaker as well as the success of the communication exchange. Stuttering also increases the duration of the response and therefore increases the likelihood that the success of the communication exchange will be compromised. Further, investigators who have looked at attitudinal variables associated with parents of young children who stutter have concluded that these parents make more negative

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statements to their children and generally exhibit more signs of impatience in conversation than do parents of children who do not stutter (Kasprisin-Burelli, Egolf, & Shames, 1972; Mordecai, cited in Meyers & Freeman, 1985). It would be reasonable to conjecture that parents who harbor feelings of anxiety associated with their children's speaking reflect this feeling in their facial expressions as well as in their speech. Once conveyed, additional pressure to speak fluently may be brought to bear on the child. The parent asks the child a question, thus relinquishing the "conversational floor" and handing the turn over to the child. It could be speculated that as the parent turns the conversation over to the child by asking a question, the child's sense of communicative time urgency (Conture, 1990; Starkweather et al., 1990) increases and it becomes difficult for the child to initiate a fluent response. Despite the belief in the negative effect of question-asking, there are currently no studies demonstrating that children who stutter show a greater propensity to stutter in response to a question than when contributing to a conversation by making statements, or when asking their own questions. It is important to determine conclusively whether questioning as it naturally occurs is detrimental to the young stutterer. Eliminating or greatly reducing the number of questions asked by parents might dramatically change the nature of the conversations normally carried out between young children and their parents, who often serve as their chief conversationalists. For example, it has been demonstrated in studies of young, normally developing children that questions compose a large proportion of their parents' conversational repertoires (Broen, 1972; Holzman, 1974). A significant change in this pattern could result in a reduction of the potential benefits that might come from being the recipient of questions posed in conversation. Hoff-Ginsberg (1990) recently suggested in a study of the effects of maternal input on children's language acquisition that mothers' language may serve the dual purposes of presenting new syntactic information and "eliciting conversation from the child" (p. 87). With question use, the co-conversationalist provides the young child with an opportunity to join in the conversation by turning over the "floor" and extending the opportunity to take a turn to the child. Thus, an arbitrary alteration in the status quo with regard to frequency of question-asking may have a harmful side to language learning and conversational participation as well as a beneficial side in terms of fluency enhancement. It also appears that where the stuttering literature focuses on the use or over-use of questions, authors have generally viewed them as a single category of utterances. One notable exception to this orientation has been evident in the work of Stocker and her colleagues (Stocker, 1980; Stocker & Gerstman, 1983; Stocker & Usprich, 1976), who considered questions on a continuum regarding the "level of demand" imposed on the child. That is, questions may differ in terms of the amount of communicative responsibility they place on the respondent. As the "uncertainty of the communication" (Stocker & Usprich, 1976, p. 117) increases, level of demand increases. According to Stocker and her colleagues' reasoning, the respondent then shoulders more responsibility for communicative success, and it is more likely that disfluencies will occur. Where fewer communicative responsibilities are

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Journalof Speech and HearingResearch

assumed, the level of demand is lower, and thus the expectation for disfluencies decreases. Therefore, one approach to changing conversation patterns with regard to questionasking, if changes need to be made at all, may be more specific than an across-the-board reduction in the number of questions asked per unit of conversation. Another variable that will need to be addressed is the contribution of the length and complexity of children's responses to the likelihood that disfluencies will be produced. There is some evidence that increases in length and complexity are correlated with increases in normal disfluent behaviors in children who have not been diagnosed as stutterers (Gordon, Luper, & Peterson, 1986) as well as in children who have been diagnosed as stutterers (BernsteinRatner & Sih, 1987). Recently, Gaines, Runyan, & Meyers (1990) demonstrated that the productions of longer and more complex sentences by 4- to 6-year-old children diagnosed as stutterers were significantly more likely to be characterized by stuttering in their first three words than were shorter and less complex sentences. Therefore, when assessing connections between disfluencies and responses to questions, the lengths and linguistic complexities of the responses should be evaluated. The purposes of this study were to (a)determine the extent to which requests asked by parents in a conversational context elicited disfluencies from a group of young stutterers, and (b) determine which utterances made by these children were particularly vulnerable to disfluency production. The specific experimental questions explored were as follows: 1. Do young children diagnosed as stutterers and engaged in conversation with their own parents produce disfluencies to a significantly greater degree when answering questions than when they are commenting, making statements, or asking their own questions? 2. What is the effect of length and complexity of the utterances produced by the young stutterers on the likelihood that those utterances will be produced with disfluencies? 3. Do length and complexity vary systematically depending on the conversation role played by the utterance (e.g., responses, assertives)? 4. What types of requests, as categorized by level of demand, do parents of young stuttering children tend to make in conversation? 5. Does the type of request made by parents, as categorized by level of demand, increase the likelihood of a child's response being produced with disfluencies?

Method Subjects Eight parent-child pairs participated in this study. All of the children and their parents had previously participated in a study comparing the parents' use of assertive and responsive conversation act types in conversation with their children (Weiss, 1990; Weiss & Zebrowski, 1992). As a result of preliminary testing for that study, each child had demonstrated functioning within the age-expected normal range for receptive and expressive language based on a test battery

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TABLE 1. Subject characteristics. Subject

Age at testing

Sex

Severity (SSI)

1 4:0 F Mild 2 5:7 M Moderate 3 5:8 M Mild 4 6:6 F Moderate 5 7:0 M Moderate 6 7:7 F* Moderate 7 8:3 M Mild 8 10:7 M. Severe *These two subjects were videotaped with their fathers. The remaining subjects were videotaped in conversation with their mothers. that included the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-R (Dunn & Dunn, 1981), three subtests from the Test of Language Development (Newcomer & Hammill, 1988) that yielded a listening quotient for a composite measure of language comprehension, the Structured Photographic Expressive Language Test (Werner & Kresheck, 1985), the Test of Word Finding (German, 1986), and the screening test from the Templin-Darley Tests of Articulation (Templin & Darley, 1969). All of the children had also passed a pure-tone hearing screening. The 8 subjects, 3 girls and 5 boys, ranged in age from 4:0 to 10:7 (M = 6:11) (years:months). Each had been diagnosed as a stutterer by an ASHA-certified speech-language pathologist (the second author) by meeting both of the following criteria: (a) he or she exhibited three or more within-word disfluencies (e.g., sound or syllable repetitions, prolongations, broken words, and monosyllabic whole-word repetitions as per Conture, 1990) per 100 words of conversational speech across three, contiguous 100-word samples of conversation (Yairi & Lewis, 1984; Zebrowski, Conture, & Cudahy, 1985), and (b) the child's parent(s) or primary caregiver(s) expressed concern that the child was stuttering or was a stutterer (Zebrowski & Conture, 1989). These children had produced an average of 11 within-word disfluencies per 100 words (range = 5-23; SD = 5.99). The Stuttering Severity Instrument (Riley, 1980) was also administered and the results divided the 8 subjects into three severity groups: 3 children were classified mild stutterers, 4 were designated moderate stutterers, and the remaining subject was found to be in the severe range. Table 1 summarizes these subjects' characteristics. The 8 parents (2 fathers and 6 mothers), who participated in conversations with their own children, served as coconversationalists. All of the parents had completed at least 12 years of school. Both of the fathers and half of the mothers worked outside the home on at least a part-time basis. Procedure Twenty minutes of conversation were videotaped for each parent-child pair. The videotaping took place in a room designated for diagnostic evaluations in a university clinic, which was equipped with a one-way mirror and a wallmounted videocamera (Panasonic WV3060 mounted on a Vicon Micropan). Because the camera and recording equip-

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Weiss & Zebrowski: Disfluencies in Conversations

ment (Panasonic AG 6300 VHS Videorecorder with a F21 SMPTE Time Code Generator Reader) were controlled from an adjoining room, the investigators were out of the sight of the subjects during data collection. The parents and children had been told that they were being videotaped. Audiorecording was accomplished by a SONY ECM-144 Electret Condenser Microphone clipped to the child's clothing approximately 6 inches from the child's mouth. The parent/child pairs were seated across from each other at a table and asked to converse together as they "usually did." Age-appropriate books and other materials were made available to the subjects but they were told not to restrict their discussions to the materials provided. Ten minutes of each parent-child pair's conversation was transcribed (transcription began with the second minute of the conversation sample) and then later coded for conversation-act production for both speakers, as well as loci and type of disfluency for the child.

DataAnalysis Instead of using a syntax-based system for coding the utterances produced (i.e., questions, declaratives, imperatives), Fey's (1986) taxonomy for delineation of assertive and responsive conversation acts was used to code the utterances produced by both participants in their conversation. This was done because limiting the study to requests made in question form only would have eliminated from the investigation a number of instances in which a child was required to provide information, clarification, or some other type of response to a nonquestion form (e.g., "Tell me your name"). Thus, Fey's use of the term "request" was more inclusive than the use of the term "question"; it made it easier to delineate adult utterances that entailed a response on the part of the child from adult conversational exchanges that required no response. According to Fey (1986), assertive conversation acts are those that are not overtly solicited by the conversation partner. There are three groups of assertives: (a) requestives, that solicit information, action, clarification or attention; (b) assertives, that label, report facts, state rules, or provide explanations; and (c) performatives, that are defined as claims, jokes, or protests that are "accomplished just by being produced" (p. 72). Responsive conversation acts comply with a request already made by the co-conversationalist. Thus, the responsive conversation-act types are complements to the requestive conversation acts already mentioned and are considered to be responses to requests for information, clarification, attention, or action. There are also responses coded as responses to performatives. Conture's (1990) delineation of two classes of disfluency types, within-word disfluencies, which can be categorized as stutterings, and between-word disfluencies, which can represent normal disfluencies, was used. Presently there are no absolute definitions of what speech behaviors constitute stuttering or who is a stutterer (Conture, 1990, pp. 14-15). However, the consideration of within-word speech disfluencies as characteristic of stuttering is based on previous research in the speech disfluencies of children who stutter as well as in listener judgments of stuttering, and has been

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discussed elsewhere (see Zebrowski, 1991). For the identification and tallies of these two types of disfluencies, sound/ syllable repetitions, sound prolongations, broken words, and monosyllabic whole-word repetitions were considered to be within-word disfluency types, and multisyllabic whole-word repetitions, phrase repetitions, interjections, and revisions were considered to be between-word disfluencies. For purposes of analysis and reliability measures in this study, only the classifications of within-word disfluency versus betweenword disfluency were considered. Tallies of individual disfluency types, for example, interjections and sound repetitions, were not reported. Each child's conversation sample was analyzed for both mean length of utterance (MLU) (Brown, 1973) and developmental sentence score (DSS) (Lee, 1974) as measures of length and complexity, respectively. Note that the MLU and DSS measures were not used to derive language ages for the children but rather as a means to quantify the sentence lengths and their complexities in some standard fashion. According to Lee's (1974) conventions, any sentence not containing a subject and a predicate was excluded from DSS analysis. All utterances were eligible to derive the MLU, however. These measures were calculated for two separate sample delineations for each subject: the fluent versus disfluent sample, and the assertive versus responsive sample. Thus, four DSS and four MLU measurements were gleaned from each child's sample for the comparisons reported. The requests made by the parents to their children were coded for "level of demand" (Stocker & Usprich, 1976) in order to account in some sense for differences in the communicative responsibility necessitated by each request. It has been argued recently that the notion of communicative responsibility as intended by Stocker and Usprich (1976) is confounded by demands for lengthier and more complex responses (Martin, Parlour, & Haroldson, 1990). It is acknowledged that the measure of communicative responsibility may involve a number of variables in addition to length and complexity (e.g., motor demands, social demands). However, the five demand levels proposed by Stocker and Usprich (1976) were used to categorize and quantify the types of request made by the parents in the present study because this information could provide insights into the pattems of requests made by individual parents within the parent-child dyads. The definitions for the five different demand levels were accommodated from Stocker and Usprich's (1976) original definitions, where necessary, to account for the fact that the requests produced in the current study were produced in a natural conversational setting. The original definitions for demand levels were developed by Stocker and her colleagues to be used in a highly structured and contrived assessment and treatment program in which the level of demand was controlled by the examiner throughout the procedure. See the Appendix for a description of these expanded definitions for Levels of Demand I through V used to categorize parent requests in this study. A number of reliability measures were obtained. The original conversation transcripts for the 8 subject dyads were transcribed in broad transcription within 2 weeks of the taping

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35 1230-1238 December 992

TABLE 2. Proportion of disfluent utterances (Us) by disfluency type [within-word (Ws) vs. between-word (BWs) vs. both (Ws + BWs)l. Disfluent Us Subject

No. of Us

No.

%

No. of Us w/Ws

1 2

30 93

12 38

40 41

9 32

3 1

0 5

3 4

91 89

41 21

45 24

24 7

10 11

7 3

5 6 7 8

73 95 79 43

20 35 28 21

27 37 35 49

19 29 17 13

0 5 9 1

1 1 2 7

Totals

593

216 (M = 37%)

150/69%

sessions. The first author and one graduate student were responsible for these transcriptions. Each of the two raters independently transcribed the eight conversations, indicating the speaker and the transcription of the turn itself. Syllables that were still untranscribable following three plays of the tape were marked as "X," so that a three-syllable, unintelligible word was transcribed as "XXX" (Shriberg & Kwiatkowski, 1980). Word-by-word comparisons of the eight transcripts yielded an overall reliability measure of .83, mostly because of one transcript that had a noticeably poorer audio quality than the rest. Because this was lower than we would accept for the next step of coding the samples, the two raters undertook a consensus procedure in which all discrepancies were discussed and resolved. The sample transcripts were then coded for assertive and responsive conversation acts. A third set of codings on the transcripts was for disfluency type. The reliability ratings for these sets of codings (e.g., transcripts, assertive and responsive categories, and disfluency type) were the same analyses completed previously for a different study and reported elsewhere (Weiss & Zebrowski, 1992). Point-by-point reliability measures for 25% of the samples that were randomly selected yielded .95 agreement for conversation-act type (assertive vs. responsive utterances, where all types of assertive and responsive conversation acts were considered). Reliability measures of .97 for location of disfluency and .92 for disfluency type (within-word vs. between-word disfluency) were then calculated for four samples analyzed by the first author and a graduate student trained in the coding procedures but naive to the purposes of the study. In the same four samples, reliability measures for disfluent versus fluent utterances yielded a reliability percentage of .99. Reliability for DSS and MLU calculations were completed by comparing the two authors' calculations for two complete and randomly selected conversation samples. MLU reliability across the two samples was .99 and DSS reliability was .89. Finally, reliability measures for the level-of-demand codings were calculated from comparisons of ratings for half of the parents' samples completed by the first author and a graduate student, trained in the coding procedure and also blind to the purpose of the study. The reliability percentages averaged over all demand levels was .90, with a range from .84 (Level III) to .93 (Level IV). Both raters agreed that there were no examples of Level V demands in any of the parents' samples.

Results

No. of Us w/BWs

40/19%

No. of Us w/Both

26/12%

There were 593 total utterances included in the 8 children's conversation samples (M = 74.13, range = 30-95, SD = 23.02). Of these, 301 (51%) were coded as fulfilling assertive conversation acts (M = 37.63, range = 23-55, SD = 16.26), and the remaining 292 (49%) were coded as responsive conversation acts (M = 36.5, range = 7-58, SD = 19.93). That is, on the average, these young stutterers devoted almost as much of their conversational participation to making statements and comments, asking questions or disagreeing, as they did to responding to requests. When utterances were divided into those containing at least one instance of disfluency (here both within-word and between-word disfluencies were considered as equal evidence of disfluency) and those containing fluent speech only, 377 (64%) were produced fluently and the remaining 216 (36%) contained at least one disfluency. A 2 x 2 chi-square contingency table delineating utterances by conversation-act type (assertive vs. responsive) and fluency (disfluent vs. fluent production) yielded a significant difference in distribution [X2(1) = 28.66, p < .001], which indicated that responsive utterances were more likely to be produced fluently than were assertive utterances. A breakdown of each subject's proportion of disfluent utterances by disfluency type (withinword vs. between-word) appears in Table 2. The findings suggest that for these stuttering children, answers to questions were far less likely to be produced disfluently than were their conversational participations that took the form of comments, statements, and other assertions. In order to further explore some of the characteristics of these fluent and disfluent utterances, length and complexity measures (MLU and DSS respectively) were calculated. As noted previously, calculation of the DSS necessitates that the utterances being considered contain both a subject and predicate form. Sentences that contain only one or the other, or neither, are eliminated from the sample used for calculation. For all 8 subjects who participated in this study, a proportion of their utterances, ranging from 32% to 81% (M = 64%) met the criterion for inclusion in the DSS analysis. It is important to note that for all 8 subjects, a higher proportion of assertive utterances than responsive utterances were included for DSS analysis and this difference reached statistical significance [t(7) = 7.84, p < .001].

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Weiss & Zebrowski: Dis nies inConversations

TABLE 4. Percentage of diefluent responaea (Rs) to parental requests according to demand level.

TABLE 3. Parents' requests coded by "level of demand." Level of Demand

Subject/ dyads

n

1

14

2

82

3 4 5 6 7 8

33 77 82 64 65 14

I 8* 23

25* 20 45* 23 36* 4

11

III

IV

V

4

2

0

0

50*

4

5

0

6 17 22 33* 20 2

2 24* 12 7 6 6*

0 16 3 1 3 2

1235

0 0 0 0 0 0

Totals 431 184 154 63 30 0 % 43 36 15 7 *Highest proportion of requests were at this "level of demand" for this respondent. When the utterances were categorized according to whether an utterance contained one or more disfluencies, both MLU and DSS yielded significant differences between fluent and disfluent productions [MLU: t(7) = 6.99, p < .001; DSS: t(7) = 32.41, p < .001]. Taken together, the disfluent utterances gleaned from the 8 subjects' samples were significantly longer and more complex than those produced fluently. To determine whether length and complexity measures would reveal differences depending on the conversation-act type encoded, the 593 utterances were again divided into the two conversation-act types of interest and the DSS (assertives: M = 7.91, SD = 2.55; responsives: M = 8.06, SD = 1.91) and MLU measurements (assertives: M = 5.86, SD = 1.63; responsives: M = 3.32, SD = 1.03) for these groupings were compared. Although this delineation failed to yield significant differences between assertives and responsives for the DSS measure (complexity) [(7) = .14, p > .05], a significant difference was revealed for MLU (length) [t(7) = 3.13, p < .05], with assertive utterances being significantly longer than those coded as responsives. Responses do not occur without a request having been made. To analyze the extent to which different request types played a part in eliciting fluent or disfluent responses, the requests made by the parents were analyzed for demand level: an accommodation of Stocker and colleagues' "level of demand" (Stocker & Usprich, 1976) taxonomy. These results are presented in Table 3. As shown in Table 3, the samples varied greatly in terms of the number of requests made of the children (range, 14-82; M = 53.88, SD = 27.34). Overall, the majority of requests made by the parents were considered to be at Level I, with successively higher levels of demand represented by smaller and smaller proportions of the total requests. There were no Level V requests. Chi-square analysis for the frequency of requests produced for each demand level revealed that for this group of parents, these frequencies were significantly different from what would have been expected by chance [X2(4) = 293.37, p < .001]. According to Stocker and Usprich (1976), the higher the level of demand, the more communicative responsibility inherent in the response, and the more likely it is that

Level of Demand

I

II

III

IV

V

No. of Requests No. of Disfluent Rs % of Disfluent Rs

184 23 13

154 31 20

63 16 25

30 6 20

0 0 0

disfluencies will result. In half of the samples (n = 4), Level I requests predominated, and two samples showed Level II requests in the majority. The two remaining samples had Level III requests as their largest proportion of requests. The parents' requests were not correlated with their children's ages as far as demand level was concerned, as revealed by a Spearman rank correlation comparing the subjects' ages and the proportion of Level I requests in the parent's sample (r, = -0.208, p > .05). Inspection of the data from Table 3 reveals that the 4 children who were provided with their highest proportion of requests from the Level I category were S1, S3, S5, and S7, where SI represented the youngest subject and S7 the second oldest subject. It was important not only to divide up the requests with respect to the level of demand as they were produced but also in terms of the degree to which disfluencies co-occurred. To that end, the responses to the requests delineated in Table 3 were examined for presence or absence of disfluencies. Of the total number of requests made by the parents (431), only 76, or 18%, resulted in responses that contained disfluencies. The percentages of disfluent responses by level of demand are presented in Table 4. Analysis of the distribution of the 76 disfluent responses across the four different request types (there were no Level V requests) with which they were associated, revealed a distribution significantly different from expectations [X2(3) = 17.79, p < .001]. The Level II, III, and IV requests were more frequently associated with disfluent responses than were the Level I requests.

Discussion The results of this study demonstrated that the responses to questions made by 8 children diagnosed as stutterers were significantly less likely to be produced with one or more disfluencies than were their assertive contributions to the conversation. This outcome runs counter to the results expected given the cautions with which questioning by parents of young stutterers has been met in the literature. Fluent responses to questions were not garnered without some "cost," however. The responses produced fluently were significantly shorter and somewhat less complex in structure than were the subjects' assertive contributions to the conversation. Given the outcome of at least one recent study in which fluent and disfluent utterances were compared for length and complexity using the same measures (Gaines, Runyan, & Meyers, 1991), this result was not entirely unexpected. Infact, the majority of questions asked by the parents in the present study were simple yes/no questions for which only single-word responses were required (Level I). It was observed that when parental requests imposed less of a

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demand for a more complicated response, the maintenance of fluency was not as much of a problem for these children. Because the findings from this study run counter to the clinical assumption present in the stuttering literature, an alternative interpretation of how young children who stutter handle the question-and-answer scenario is needed. First, it may be inappropriate to group all questions/requests together and to suggest that one type of outcome (an increase in disfluencies) will result. For example, in the present study some parental requests resulted in disfluent speech from the child but the majority did not. The subjects in the present study were most frequently presented with requests by their parents that necessitated shorter and less complex responses (Level I). Thus, the subjects were able to use response patterns that necessitated a relatively low level of communicative responsibility and provided the information needed, thus enabling them to maintain fluency. It is certainly possible that had the questioning occurred in a less natural setting in which more requests from the higher demand levels (Levels IllI-V) were presented, for example, in a somewhat structured, experimental protocol, the results might have indicated greater difficulty with fluent responses to requests. However, it appears in this study that either the parents were sensitive to their children's difficulties with requests that according to Stocker bestow greater communicative responsibility, or the natural conversation setting did not require requests at these higher levels. Whatever the cause, these young subjects were able to demonstrate fluency in their responsive role in conversations with their own parents. Why did the subjects in the present study have more difficulty producing fluent, assertive contributions to conversations? There are at least two different explanations for this finding, one of which may also lie within the realm of communicative responsibility. First, the assertions were longer utterances on average than were the responsives and that alone may have increased the likelihood that they would be produced disfluently (Gaines et al., 1991). Second, the production of an assertion, whether it is a comment, a statement, or the speaker's own request, embodies more novelty than does a response to a request. In contingent responses to requests, the topic has already been established by the speaker, leaving less communicative choice or responsibility for conveyance by the respondent. The topic is considered old information, already shared by the speaker and the listener (Chafe, 1976). The notion of communicative responsibility is not new to the stuttering literature and has been mentioned before as a variable that may exacerbate disfluency. The appearance of the Stocker Probe technique in the mid-1970s represented renewed interest in this line of thinking. Eisenson and Wells (1942) viewed the introduction of communicative responsibility into a choral speech task as the variable that resulted in an increase in stuttering exhibited by a number of their subjects. In 1945, Eisenson and Horowitz (1945) noted that "as meanings and the responsibility for meanings become prominent, stuttering increases" (p. 197). In addition, Quarrington's (1965) research led him to assert that "the likelihood that a word will be stuttered is some function of its information value in the total speech act" (p. 223). Although

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it is not suggested here that the concept of communicative responsibility can be used alone to explain where and when stuttering will be produced, it appears possible that this variable makes some contribution. When using discourse parameters to analyze the conversations of stutterers, consideration of varying levels of communicative responsibility reveals where in the discourse more uncertainty and more room for a novel contribution by the speaker exist. If these findings are upheld in future studies following analysis of lengthier conversation samples with larger numbers of parent-child dyads, there may be a number of implications for the treatment of young stutterers. For example, the function of questions and requests in specific parentchild dyads will need to be scrutinized more closely before recommendations are made to parents to diminish their use. In addition, for some children, the use of requests that represent lower levels of demand may actually be welcome additions to the conversational milieu. They may provide some youngsters with an opportunity to enter the conversation more easily and converse fluently, especially in the earlier stages of treatment. The interpretation of the findings from the present study is somewhat limited because measures of response latencies between parent requests and child responses and measures of parent rates of request-making have not been calculated. That is, it is unclear at this time whether the findings mask individual differences that may exist in parent-child dyads with respect to the amount of time permitted for responses and the rate of question delivery. It may turn out that some parent-child pairs handle requests/responses in a fluency-maintaining manner and others do not. In addition to the replication of the results of this study, future research should focus on determining whether fewer instances of disfluencies in a child's responses co-occur with a parent questioner who exhibits more tolerance in waiting for a response and who makes requests less often and less rapidly. Conversation transcripts in future studies should also be analyzed to include topic initiation, topic maintenance, and topic shifting maneuvers so that an utterance level perspective (Fey, 1986) on communicative responsibility can be explored. Perhaps the most useful conclusion to be reached from the data presented in this study is for clinicians to consider the role that responses to questions/requests play in naturally occurring discourse for the individual young client who stutters.

Acknowledgments We wish to thank Colleen Gardner for her assistance with typing the final draft of this manuscript. Mario Robinson, who served as a graduate assistant to the first author, is also acknowledged for her time and efforts. Finally, we are very grateful to associate editor Dale

Evan Metz and editorial consultants Barry Guitar and Janis Costello

Ingham, who provided us with many thoughtful and helpful comments following the careful readings of the manuscript.

References Adams, M. (1990). The demands and capacities model I: Theoret-

ical elaboration. Journal of Fluency Disorders, 15, 135-141.

Andrews, G., Craig, A., Feyer, A., Hoddlnott, A., Howlse, P., &

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Weiss & Zebrowski: Disfluencies in Conversations Nellson, M. (1983). Stuttering: A review of research findings and theories circa 1982. Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders, 48, 226-246. Bernsteln-Ratner, N., & Sih, C. (1987). Effects of gradual increases in sentence length on children's disfluency. Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders, 52, 278-287. Broen, P. (1972). The verbal environment of the language-learning child. ASHA Monographs, Number 17, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. Brown, R. (1973). A first language: The early stages. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Chafe, W. (1976). Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics, and point of view. In C. Li (Ed.), Subject and topic. New York: Academic Press. Conture, E. (1990). Stuttering (2nd ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Dunn, L., & Dunn, L. (1981). Peabody Picture Vocabulary TestRevised. Circle Pines, MN: American Guidance Service. Elsenson, J., & Horowitz, E. (1945). The influence of propositionality on stuttering. Journal of Speech Disorders, 10, 193-197. Elsenson, J., & Wells, C. (1942). A study of the influence of communicative responsibility in a choral speech situation for stutterers. Journal of Speech Disorders, 7, 259-262. Fey, M. (1986). Language intervention with young children. Needham, MA: Allyn & Bacon. Gaines, N., Runyan, C., & Meyers, S. (1991). A comparison of young stutterers' fluent versus stuttered utterances on measures of length and complexity. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 34, 37-42. German, D. (1986). Test of word finding. Allen, TX: DLM Teaching Resources. Gordon, P., Luper, H., & Peterson, H. (1986). The effects of syntactic complexity on the occurrence of disfluencies in 5-yearold nonstutterers. Journal of Fluency Disorders, 11, 151-164. Gregory, H. (1990). What is involved in therapy? In E. Conture & J. Fraser (Eds.), Stuttering and your child: Questions and answers. Memphis, TN: Stuttering Foundation of America. Holzman, M. (1974). The verbal environment provided by mothers for their very young children. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 20, 31-42. Hoff-Ginsberg, E. (1990). Matemal speech and the child's development of syntax: A further look. Journal of Child Language, 17, 85-99. Kasprlsin-Burell, A., Egolf, D., & Shames, G. (1972). A comparison of parental verbal behavior with stuttering and nonstuttering children. Journal of Communication Disorders, 5, 335-346. Langlols, A., Hanrahan, L., & Inouye, L. (1986). A comparison of interactions between stuttering children, nonstuttering children, and their mothers. Journal of Fluency Disorders, 11, 263-273. Leach, E. (1972). Interrogation: A model and some implications. Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders, 37, 33-46. Lee, L. (1974). Developmental sentence analysis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Martin, R., Parlour, S., & Haroldson, S. (1990). Stuttering and level of linguistic demand, the Stocker Probe. Journal of Fluency Disorders, 15, 93-106. Meyers, S. (1990). Verbal behaviors of preschool stutterers and conversational partners: Observing reciprocal relationships. Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders, 55, 706-712. Meyers, S., & Freeman, F. (1985). Interruptions as a variable in stuttering and disfluency. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 28, 428-435. Nelson, L. (1986). Language formulation related to disfluency and stuttering. In H. Gregory (Ed.), Stuttering therapy: Prevention and

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intervention with children. Memphis, TN: Speech Foundation of America. Newcomer, P., & Hammill, D. (1988). Test of Language Development-2 Primary. Austin, TX: Empiric Press. Prins, D. (1983). Continuity, fragmentation, and tension: Hypotheses applied to evaluation and intervention with preschool disfluent children. In D. Prins & R. Ingham (Eds.), Treatment of stuttering in early childhood, methods and issues. San Diego: College-Hill Press. Quarrlngton, B. (1965). Stuttering as a function of the information value and sentence position of words. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 70, 221-224. Riley, G. (1980). Stuttering severity instrument for children and adults. Austin, TX: Pro-Ed. Shrlberg, L., & Kwlatkowskl, J. (1980). Naturalprocess analysis: A procedure for phonological analysis of continuous speech samples. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company. Starkweather, C. (1987). Fluency and stuttering. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc. Starkweather, C., & Gottwald, S. (1990). The demands and capacities model II: Clinical applications. Journal of Fluency Disorders, 15, 143-157. Starkweather, C., Gottwald, S., & Halfond, M. (1990). Stuttering prevention: A clinical method. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Stocker, B. (1980). The Stocker Probe technique for diagnosis and treatment of stuttering in young children. Tulsa, OK: Modem Education Corporation. Stocker, B., & Gerstman, L. (1983). A comparison of the probe technique and conventional therapy for young stutterers. Journal of Fluency Disorders, 8, 331-339. Stocker, B., & Usprlch, C. (1976). Stuttering in young children and level of demand. Journal of Fluency Disorders, 1, 116-131. Templln, M., & Darley, F. (1969). Templin-Darley Tests of Articulation. Iowa City: University of Iowa Bureau of Educational Research and Service. Weiss, A. (November, 1990). Parent-child conversations of young stutterers: Assertiveness-responsiveness measures. Paper presented to the annual meeting of the American Speech-LanguageHearing Association, Seattle. Weiss, A., & Zebrowskl, P. (1991). Pattems of assertiveness and responsiveness in parental interactions with stuttering and fluent children. Journal of Fluency Disorders, 16, 125-143. Werner, E., & Kresheck, J. (1985). Structured Photographic Expressive Language Test-II (SPELT-II). Sandwich, IL: Janelle Publications. Yalrl, E., & Lewis, B. (1984). Disfluencies at the onset of stuttering. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 27, 154-159. Zebrowskl, P. (1991). Duration of the speech disfluencies of beginning stutterers. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 34, 483-491. Zebrowskl, P., & Conture, E. (1989). Judgments of disfluency by mothers of stuttering and normally fluent children. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 32, 625-634. Zebrowskl, P., Conture, E., & Cudahy, E. (1985). Acoustic analyses of young stutterers' fluency. Journal of Fluency Disorders, 10, 173-192. Received July 29, 1991 Accepted March 24, 1992 Contact author: Amy L. Weiss, PhD, Department of Speech Pathology and Audiology, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242.

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Appendix The following definitions were used to code the parents' requests in the language samples collected. Because Level of Demand referred to the speaker's request and not to the listener's response, it was possible for the response to exceed the expectations of the demand. The definitions as per Stocker and Usprich (1976, p. 118) are given first for each level. Additions made for the present study to account for specific instances and the more naturalistic context are indicated within brackets. Note that although the term question is used throughout by Stocker and Usprich, it is request forms, for example, requests for information or clarification, that were coded. Level I A level I question produces a single-word response that repeats one of the words in the examiners question. Example: Is it hard or soft? (All yes/no questions, with the exception of clarification requests, are included under this category. Typically, the response called for is a single word but could be longer depending on the length of the option provided in the request, e.g., Do you want the red car or the green truck?) Level II: A level IIquestion also produces a single-word response: the name of a common object present in the examining situation but not given in the question. Example: What is it? (Requests may call for more than a single-word response, e.g., What is it?, when the question would rightfully elicit "the red car" or "the green truck."

Requests for clarification, e.g., You want me to help you bake the cake?, are typically Level II demands.) Level Ill: A level IIIlquestion produces a response consisting of a prepositional phrase where the referents are not present in the examining situation and are not named in the request. Example: Where would you keep one? (Requests at Level IIIlmay necessitate the production of more than a prepositional phrase; a complete sentence may be necessary. Note that one critical difference between Level II and Level IIIlrequests has to do with the presence or the absence of the referent.) Level IV: A level IV request produces a series of attributes not named in the request; furthermore, unlike the Level II and IIIl situations, the syntactic form of the response is not constrained by the nature of the question. Example: Tell me everything you know about it. (Why? and How? questions are considered Level IV demands. How many? or other questions requiring a numerical response are listed at Level III.) Level V: A level V request is open-ended and produces the most variable responses both in form and content. Example: Make up your own story about it.

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