The relationship between communication attitude and fluency failure of stuttering and nonstuttering children

This investigation was designed to determine the relationship, if any, between the speech-associated beliefs and fluency failures of grade-school children who do and do not stutter. Toward this end, a Dutch version of the Communication Attitude Test (C.A.T.) was administered to 55 age-matched Belgian children representative of the two groups. Their C.A.T. scores and the degree to which they emitted fluency failures during oral reading and conversation were correlated. For the children in the experimental group, the C.A.T. scores covaried to a statistically significant extent with both the failures thought to characterize stuttering and those considered to be normal disfluencies. In contrast, the communication attitude scores of the nonstutterers did not correlate with the display of either of these classes of fluency failure. These findings would seem to indicate both that the difference between children who stutter and those who do not involves more than the degree to which their speech is disrupted and that determining the communication attitude of children whose fluency is problematic can serve as an aid in differential diagnostic assessment and therapeutic considerations.