The research article, The Disfluent Speech of Bilingual Spanish-English Children: Considerations for Differential Diagnosis of Stuttering, by Courtney T. Byrd, Lisa M. Bedore, and Daniel Ramos was published earlier this month. Since the Bilingualism Research Lab, at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is also conducting research on the study of bilingualism we decided to contact one of the authors for more information. Courtney T. Byrd kindly agreed to give a brief summary of their article, stating that, “Researchers recently suggested bilingualism is a risk factor for stuttering. Our study suggests that the assumption that there is an increased risk is confounded by the critical overlap that exists in the disfluencies that we categorize as mazes and those we categorize as stuttering like disfluencies. Thus, we propose the risk is related to false positive diagnosis of stuttering as opposed to true positive risk of development. In this manuscript we also offer specific suggestions to enhance differential diagnosis of stuttering in Spanish-English bilinguals and monolingual English speakers.”

More information on their article: http://lshss.pubs.asha.org/article.aspx?articleid=1905885#.VBhJsk9DzTg.facebook