Correlation between the Stuttering Severity and the Pragmatic Development in the Egyptian Children Who Stutter

Abstract

Stuttering is a childhood-onset fluency disorder, defined by frequent prolongations, repetitions, or blocks of spoken sounds, syllables, phrases or words. It is one of the most common developmental disorders and affects approximately one to two per cent of the population at a given time. It is most common in children, and usually begins in early childhood between two and five years of age. Over the years there have been many theories about the etiology of stuttering, yet none of these theories was satisfactory to explain the exact etiology. These theories are organic theories, psychoneurotic theories, learning theories, Genetic, psycholinguistic theories and Multifactorial theory. Stuttering severity could be assessed by several qualitative and quantitative measures. Qualitative measures describe the reaction to the stuttering symptom such as the new Van Riper equation and Bloodstein classification. One of the quantitative methods used to measure the stuttering severity is the Stuttering Severity Instrument for Children and Adults-Arabic version (ASSI).