Disfluent Speech and the Psychological Aspect among Bilingual PWS in Japanese

Abstract

Introduction: Stuttering is a fluency disorder that involves problems with fluency and the flow of speech. In previous research, results have emerged where the types of disfluency in bilingual people who stutter (PWS) and monolingual PWS were different. There has, however, been no research into the language characteristics and psychological characteristics of Japanese-speaking bilingual PWS. The purpose of this study was to investigate the characteristics of disfluency and psychology in Japanese-speaking bilingual PWS. Methods: Five bilingual PWS and have lived in Japan participated in this study. The tasks consisted of 50 phrases of oral reading tasks, 200 phrases of conversational speech samples, and an Overall Assessment of the Speaker’s Experience of Stuttering (OASES) translated into Japanese. Results: All of the participants stuttered in every language they spoke, and most of them answered that their stutter varied from one language to another. The disfluency in conversational speech samples showed that there were high frequencies of interjection among the participants. The OASES result showed that most participants had high impact scores in Section 2 (Reactions to stuttering). Discussions: The fact that all participants had stuttering symptoms in all the languages they spoke was consistent with previous research. Interjection was the most frequent disfluency, differing from previous research on Japanese monolingual PWS. This may have some relationship with bilingual PWS having difficulty in the proficiency of the language and in finding the correct words. There were no significant differences in the OASES scores from previous research for monolingual PWS and as such, further research will be needed.

Keywords

Bilingal; stuttering; disfluency; Japanese

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.32698/GCS-04278