Abstract Book of the 9th International Conference on Research in Education, Teaching and Learning
Year: 2025
DOI:
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Establishing stuttering instruments for Arabic Children Who Stutter, CWS, I. Phonological complexity in Disfluent Speech
Roaa Alsulaiman, Reem Alyahya, Hanour Altuwaijri, Lamia Aldukair
ABSTRACT:
Widely-used instruments such as SSI-4 (Riley, 2009) do not take into account the structural features of Arabic. Currently, no tool is available for assessing dyfluency in Arabic even though calls have been made for clear symptom-definition and assessment procedures when studying stuttering in languages other than English (Howell & Rusbridge, 2011). The distinct differences between Arabic and English can offer insights about language-specific influences on disfluency manifestation. As a first step towards adapting SSI-4 for Arabic, a scheme was developed for the analysis of Arabic stuttered speech based on the Arabic Index of Phonetic Complexity (AIPC; Al-Tamimi et al., 2013). The AIPC assays difficulty of words based on their phonetic constituents, and the measures are then used to gauge susceptibility to likelihood of word being stuttered. It was predicted that stuttered words would have higher AIPC scores than fluent control-words. Conversational speech samples were collected by a certified speech-language therapists from 10 children who stutter (CWS) who ranged in age between 7 and 14 years old. Words were coded as fluent or stuttered and the types of stutter designated were repetition, prolongation and break. AIPC scores were obtained by summing up the number of phonetic factors within each word. Stuttered words had higher AIPC scores than their non-stuttered counterparts. While our results remain preliminary given the small sample size, they suggest that Arabic stuttered words with specific phonetic characteristics pose more difficulty and therefore attract more stuttering. This establishes the phonetic parameters are associated with difficulty that leads to stuttering in Arabic. The next goal is to establish a valid formula that can combine lexical types and phonological complexity into an overall severity score. At the same time, our work examines issues that arise in conversion between word and syllable counts when assessing stuttering in Arabic.
keywords: stuttering, assessment, language, screening