Language disorder of a stuttered man aged 26

ABSTRACT

More than one million of the students served in the public schools' special education programs in the 1997-98 school year were categorized as having a speech or language impairment, speech disorders refer to difficulties producing speech sounds or problems with voice quality, such as stuttering.

Stuttering is a speech disorder characterized by involuntary hesitations, rapid repetitions (sounds, syllables, words, or phrases), pauses, and prolongations that disrupts the smooth flow of speech. There may also be unusual facial and body movements associated with the effort to speak. It occurs in about 1% of the total adult population and 5% of children in the world and is most common in males, twins, and left-handed persons. Smttering appears slightly before adolescence and sometimes it disappears after puberty. However, if it continues to a mature age, it usually stays forever. It is three times more likely for boys than girls to get this disorder.

This qualitative non-experimental study emphasizes the specific case— language disorder by using psycholinguistic approaches to analyze the language of a stuttered man aged 26 since he is 26 years old and has already passed his puberty, but he still suffers stuttering. Therefore, the researcher is interested in observing him in order to find out the kind of linguistic disorder produced by him and describe it. She collected the data by observing his communication with others in several different situations and interviewing him and his grandmother in order to know the onset and development of his stuttering.

The results of this study show that from his daily communications in six different situations, there are three situations within several kinds of linguistic disorders produced by him and the three others, there are no lingtiistic disorders produced by him. In the first three situations, he made disfluency, blocking, avoidance behavior, and severity. Disfluency consists of repetition, prolongation, and pauses. He made some repetitions; sentence repetitions, phrase repetitions, word repetitions, syllable repetitions, and sound repetitions. Furthermore, he made two pauses: unfilled pauses and filled pauses. The last, based on his severity there are two conditions: negative conditions and positive conditions that displayed dramatically decreased and increased fluency.

Finally, by analyzing the language of a stuttered man aged 26, the researcher and the readers are expected to know about the kinds of stuttering and the aspects of it. Therefore, the next researchers are suggested to conduct a research on an adult stuttered girl or woman who is able to speak in English language in the purpose of enriching the understanding the language studies, especially on psycholinguistics, language disorder.