Stuttering: Development & Environment Factors

Developmental and Environmental Factors in Stuttering

Competition for neural resources

• The brain has a limited amount of resources that can be applied to tasks like speaking and walking.
• If a task requires significant attention or neural activity, fewer resources are available for other simultaneous tasks.

Life events

• Stressful occurrences for a child like parental divorce or hospitalization.

Speech and language environment

• The communication style in a child's home environment.
• Rapid speech, advanced language, and frequent interruptions from family members are thought to stress the child.

General Overview

• Constitutional factors predisposing a child to stuttering often remain dormant until the two-word stage of language development.
• Rapid development of motor and cognitive abilities, combined with a busy household environment, can trigger the appearance, disappearance, continuation, or worsening of stuttering.
• Developmental and environmental influences can either cause or alleviate stuttering.
• Van Riper observed that stuttering often emerges quietly, with no clear precipitating factors in the child's life.
• Determining critical developmental and environmental factors affecting stuttering's onset and progression has been challenging.
• Onset typically occurs during preschool years when children are developing most rapidly.
• Environmental influences are indicated by clinical reports linking stresses to stuttering onset and remission.
• Stuttering is more common in competitive cultures with high standards.
• Environmental factors, in addition to genetic, play a role in stuttering.

Developmental Factors

• The growing child experiences "competition for neural resources," requiring the brain to allocate resources across various stimuli and tasks.
• The brain works on several tasks simultaneously, but performance slows down when nearing maximum capacity.
• Similar tasks interfere more with each other.
• Shared resources are more problematic for children due to their immature nervous systems and limited processing capacity.
• Uneven development of skills can cause excessive disfluency. For example, physical and cognitive growth compete with the ability to coordinate rapid, articulate speech.

Demands of Physical and Motor Development

• Rapid physical growth between ages 1 and 6 can impact stuttering.
• Neurological maturation can support fluency but also spurs motor behaviors that compete with it.
• Children tend to learn to walk or talk first, but not at the same time.
• Rapid changes in the vocal tract between ages 2 and 5 pose challenges for speech motor control.
• Children use feedback to adapt motor commands to changes in their speech structures.
• Preschool children may develop repetitions and prolongations as they juggle the demands of growing sensorimotor mechanisms, increased speech rate, and complex language.

Delays in Motor Development

• Brain imaging studies suggest that inefficient neurological structures and pathways in children who stutter.
• These neural pathways are key for accurate speech production.
• Access to stored plans for speech production may be slow, resulting in stuttering.
• Studies have found that children who stutter have a delay in development of motor control.
• Children who persisted in stuttering showed more immature speech motor development.
• Differences in the rate of development might be important in stuttering.
• Children who stutter displayed imbalances of motor performance.
• Delays and dissociations in motor development were reflected in brain imaging data.

Summary of the Effect of Physical and Motor Development on Fluency

• Motor development demands affect neural resources, potentially postponing learning phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics in typically developing children.
• The development of motor abilities and language abilities might be uneven in children who stutter.

Language Learning and the Onset of Stuttering

• Language growth may affect fluency because individuals who stutter may have a fragile system.
• Children learning language are prone to both normal disfluencies and stuttering due to the load on neural resources.
• Between ages 2 and 3, a child's vocabulary increases drastically.
• Children move from single-word utterances to multiword sentences
• Language becomes more complex.
• Dalton and Hardcastle commented on the ever-increasing demands on competence and articulatory proficiency contributing to some disfluency
• Research indicates that that stuttering appears when children use longer and more complex utterances.

Delayed and Deviant Language Development

• Stuttering arises from congenital injury, therefore brain anomalies might also delay language.
• Disfluencies with language delay may cause children to become frustrated.
• Some studies found language delays or difficulties are more common among children who stutter.
• Other studies claim there are no differences.
• Those with persistent stuttering score slightly lower language tests.
• There may be above-average ability in one area of language while they have average ability in another area which may contribute to stuttering.

Summary of the Effect of Speech and Language Development on Fluency

• Stuttering typically starts between ages 2 and 5, when children are learning language intensively.
• High demand on neural resources during learning puts stress on the speech system and may cause stuttering especially if speech system is fragile.
• Studies are conflicted about language delays in children who stutter.

Cognitive Development

• Cognitive development includes the growth of perception, attention, working memory, and executive functions.
• Growth spurts might trigger or worsen stuttering. Also children are more aware and self-conscious about stuttering as abilities develop.
• Parents report that stuttering occurs or worsens during normal circumstances, coinciding with the child's cognitive growth.
• Learning causes demands on neural resources leaving for spoken language.
• Lindsay pointed out that children go through transitions in their time which disrupts linguistic and cognitive systems.
• Starkweather said that high cognitive demands make stuttering temporarily worse.
• Working memory and executive functions are important for rapid speech. Also individuals with cognitive impairments have high stuttering.

Cognitive Development and Reactions to Stuttering

• Cognitive development can influence both the onset of stuttering and the formation of negative attitudes toward oneself and one's speech.
• Around ages 3 and 4, children internalize behavior standards and can evaluate their performance, leading to emotions like embarrassment and guilt.
• Children who stutter are likely to conclude something is wrong when comparing their speech.
• Peers, in particular, respond negatively.

Summary of the Effect of Cognitive Development on Fluency

• Cognitive development can deplete neural resources for speech, which may precipitate or worsen stuttering.
• Children who stutter are more aware and develop a bad attitude.

Social and Emotional Development

Interference of Speech by Emotion

• Strong emotions can affect speech.
• The neural networks immature in early childhood may not be buffered from "cross talk.”
• Slower maturation may be closer to centers of emotion, therefore children may suffer.
• First stuttering is noticed when kids excited about something.
• Ntourou found that children showed more negative emotion.

Stages of Social and Emotional Development

• Children experience stages as they grow of social and emotional development which cause stress.
• Rothbat describes how attributes and the environment interact.
• If the child experiences a capable mother, they develop coping skills. Otherwise stresses have bigger effect.

Emotional Security

• As a child grows up, the attention may cause family issues and feelings of anger.
• Development of Self-Consciousness and Sensitivity
• Self-consciousness and sensitivity may cause disfluencies. They may only worsen the problem.

Summary of the Effect of Social and Emotional Development on Fluency

• Normal social stresses may result in disfluent speech.
• Neurophysiologically predisposed stutters create extra noise when social things are mixed in.
• The causes are the result of social.

Environmental Factors

• Stresses and pressures in the child's home impact stuttering. Like lots of interruptions.
• These interact with genetic and developmental.
• I discuss parents as the greatest influence.

Parents

• Wendell says that that child's parents were the cause of stuttering because they called the child's stuttering stuttering therefore the child tried and struggled to avoid stuttering.
• Parents are overly critical and high standards.
• Diagnosogenic view of stuttering was largely abandoned.
• Parents pass the genes not exactly cause stuttering.

Summary of the Effect of Parents on Fluency

• Diagnosogenic theory that they cause it by miscalling disfluencies is refuted.
• Slightly more perfectionistic.

Speech and Language Environment

• Van Riper says that "Stuttering begins when advances in sentence construction happen, and it is tenable that the speech of parents is hard to follow which makes the child falter"
• Speech affects stress etc to stutter etc
• Gottwald, Richels, Shapiro,
• Crystal says that the the the demands of speaking may deplete and result in breakdown.

Rate of Speech

• Meyers and Freeman found of stuttering children and that of nonstutterers. Those who speak faster is most harmful.
• Children who stutter are more prone to fluency breakdowns during rapid speech than adults.
• The other group of people did not prove their.
• Faster the mother the more severe the stutter.

Interruptions

• Frequency of parents interrupt children.
• The mothers of both stuttering and nonstuttering children. When children disfluent.
• Did not find any differences.

Asking Questions

• Studied.
• There may not be many differences.

Complexity of Language

• Most studies say the speech of those with children who stutter on parents of those with children who do not.
• Did not find any differences.
• Most studies suggests that there are no differences, but at risk less is more.

Summary of the Effects of Speech and Language Environment on Fluency

• Too far the child's level creates neural stress.
• Speech, questions, language complexities have all been shown.

Life Events

• Life events can blow to child. Such and such like loss. This happened and the parents divorce.
• Kagan said things become shy etc
• Stress will worsen their speech.

Summary of the Effects of Life Events on Fluency

• Clinicians say life events may cause.
• Those without family history of stuttering will have more emotional.
• Environmental affect constitution.