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O Bloodstein

Publications and source records attributed to O Bloodstein.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2006

Some empirical observations about early stuttering: a possible link to language development.

UNLABELLED: This article suggests a possible link between incipient stuttering and early difficulty in language formulation. The hypothesis offers a unifying explanation of an array of empirical observations. Among these observations are the following: early stuttering occurs only on the first word of a syntactic structure; stuttering does not appear to be influenced by word-related factors; early stuttering seldom occurs on one-word utterances; the earliest age at which stuttering is reported is 18 months, with the beginning of grammatical development; the age at which most onset of stuttering is reported, 2-5 years, coincides with the period during which children acquire syntax; considerable spontaneous recovery takes place at the time most children have mastered syntax; incipient stuttering is influenced by the length and grammatical complexity of utterances; young children who stutter may be somewhat deficient in language skills; boys who stutter outnumber girls. LEARNING OUTCOMES: The reader will learn about a number of empirical observations about incipient stuttering and how they may be explained by a syntax-based hypothesis about its etiology.

Age of Onset↗
PubMed1981

Early stutterings: some aspects of their form and distribution.

The speech of five stutterers ranging in age from 3 years, 10 months to 5 years, 7 months was analyzed to determine the types and loci of stutterings. Word repetition was the most frequent feature in three cases and one of the two predominant features in the remaining two cases. Almost without exception, word repetitions occurred at the beginning of syntactic units. A greater proportion of stutterings of all types appeared on the initial words of sentences or clauses than on the other words. In most cases proportionately more function words than control words were stuttered, as were more monosyllabic than polysyllabic words--just the reverse of the usual pattern in older children and adults. The tendency of older stutterers to have more difficulty on initial consonants than initial vowels appeared in only one case. The findings on the properties of stuttered words were interpreted to mean that word-bound factors as such have little influence on the loci of early stutterings. The results as a whole were related to the hypothesis that early stuttering represents mainly a type of difficulty in either the formulation or the execution of syntactic units.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed1977

Stuttering.

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Dominance, Cerebral↗
PubMed1977

Effect of adjacency on the distribution of new stutterings in two successive readings.

The consistency with which stuttering tends to occur on the same words in successive readings of a passage, though high enough to warrant the assumption that stuttering is a response to stimuli, is generally far from perfect. It was hypothesized that this is partly because stuttering sometimes occurs adjacent to previously stuttered words rather than on them, as a result of a type of adjacency effect. Ten stutterers read a 300-word passage twice in succession. The words stuttered for the first time in the second reading were analyzed to determine whether an unusually large proportion of them were adjacent to words stuttered in the first reading. No such tendency was found.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1976

Stuttering and sentence length.

The purpose of this study was to determine whether sentence length influences the frequency of stuttering. Fourteen stutterers read, in random order, 20 long and 20 short sentences. The long sentences were constructed by means of additions to the short ones: for example, She learned to swim and She learned to swim in the clear water of the lake. Only the words that the pairs of sentences had in common were compared for occurrence of stuttering. Significantly more stuttering was found on the same words when they served as the initial segments of long sentences than when they stood alone as short sentences. The results seem to give evidence of the role of motor planning, or anticipated motor complexity in stuttering.

Adolescent↗