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The purpose of this study is to document disfluency behaviors expressed by 4- and 5-year-old children who stutter and to identify whether stuttering characteristics at this age are predictive of later stuttering recovery or persistence.

We analyzed spontaneous speech samples from 47 children diagnosed with developmental stuttering when they were 4–5 years old. Based on their eventual diagnosis made the final year of participation in the longitudinal study when the children were 6–9 years old, the children were divided into two groups: children who eventually recovered from stuttering (n = 29) and children who were persisting (n = 18). We calculated a composite weighted stuttering-like disfluency (SLD) index of overall severity that considers the frequency, type, and number of repetition units of SLDs. The frequency and type of typical disfluencies were also examined.

Higher weighted …