Exploratory Examination of Speech Disfluencies in Spoken Narrative Samples of School-Age Bidialectal Children.

Unexpected findings of this study nullify both hypotheses and suggest that bidialectalism, in comparison to bilingualism, has less of an impact on speech fluency. Findings provide evidence that bidialectal speaking children are not at an increased risk for a misdiagnosis of stuttering. Clinically, these preliminary findings provide some scientific validity and specification to the appropriateness of using already established diagnostic criteria commonly used for stuttering with dialect speakers.