Persistence and Remission of Incipient Stuttering among High-risk Children

This investigation concerns the persistence of stuttering and recovery from it among highrisk children. At the end of the second year of a 6-year prospective study, 26 of 93 preschool children with a parental history of stuttering were classified as stutterers. Four years later, seven of these children were classified as persistent stutterers, and 16 children were classified as recovered stutterers. The articulatory and linguistic skills of these two groups of children and the communicative and speaking behaviors of their mothers, were measured before and after the onset of stuttering. The analysis of these measures revealed that the articulatory skills of the children and the communicative style and language complexity of the mothers differentiated the incipient stutters whose stuttering subsequently became chronic from those who recovered. © 1999 Elsevier Science Inc.