dysfluency

Developmental dysfluency is considered a normal part of childhood development.

Children with normal dysfluency tend to have stuttering difficulties that come and go.

People who stutter may "move along a continuum from fluency to dysfluency."

Symptoms of developmental dysfluency include the repetition of sounds or pauses between words.

Traditional phonics instruction can also have the unintended consequence of promoting dysfluency.

Normal dysfluency occurs in developing children as a repetition of whole words or phrases while the child searches for a particular thought or word.

Since most of these children do not stutter as adults, this normal stage of speech development is usually referred to as pseudo-stuttering or as a normal dysfluency.

A speech disfluency, also spelled speech dysfluency, is any of various breaks, irregularities, or non-lexical vocables that occurs within the flow of otherwise fluent speech.

Children with a normal dysfluency usually have brief repetitions of certain sounds, syllables or short words; however, the stuttering usually comes and goes and is most noticeable when a child is excited, stressed or overly tired.

Using a high speed videoconferencing system link, Sicotte, Lehoux, Fortier-Blanc and Leblanc (2003) assessed and treated six children and adolescents with a positive reduction in the frequency of dysfluency that was maintained six months later.

To the Editor: Re "To Fight Stuttering, Doctors Look at the Brain" (Sept. 12): As the mother of an 11-year-old boy with profound dysfluency, I feel relieved and hopeful that this disorder may finally be getting the attention it deserves.

Alternatively, many investigators into the condition feel that the psychiatric comorbidity associated with voice disorders is a result of the social isolation and anxiety that patients with these conditions feel as a consequence of their difficulty with speech, as opposed to the cause of their dysfluency.