DEVELOPMENT OF FLUENCY IN 3 TO 6 YEAR OLD NEPALESE SPEAKING CHILDREN

Abstract

Objective:

The study attempts to understand the development of speech fluency in 3 to 6 year old developing Nepalese speaking children.

Material & Methods:

This prospective study was conducted at Ganeshman Singh Memorial Academy of ENT-Head Neck Studies, IOM, Kathmandu, Nepal during December 2010 to May 2011. Three different tasks namely ; general conversation, story narration & song recitation were elicited to identify presence of disfluencies in children. Standard laptops with in-built microphone were used. PRAAT software version 5.1.22 was used for recording. Obtained data was transcribed using International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) System and was subjected to statistical analysis using two-way ANOVA.

Results:

The speech of 3-6 year old normal speaking children contains almost all the disfluency types. High proportions of disfluencies such as silent pauses, sound/syllable interjection, whole word interjection and whole word & part word repetitions occurred in all the tasks in 3 year olds.

Conclusion:

Results also indicated that 3year olds had maximum disfluencies followed by 4 year olds, 5 year olds and least in 6 year olds.

Keywords: Disfluency, Silent pauses, Sound/syllable interjection, Whole word interjection