PATTERNS OF ASSERTIVENESS AND RESPONSIVENESS IN PARENTAL INTERACTIONS WITH STUTTERING AND FLUENT CHILDREN

To investigate the conversational environments provided by parents to their own young children who stutter, measures of conventional assertiveness and responsiveness were gleaned from 16 parent-child dyads, in which eight of the children were stutterers and eight were normally fluent. Instead of investigating the specific syntactic structures produced, the measures used focused on whether or not there was a dominant conversational participant (assertiveness) and the extent to which conversational participants responded to the requests made by their co-conversationalists (responsiveness). Results indicated that the parents in the two groups did not differ significantly in terms of their assertiveness or responsiveness ratios. Assertiveness ratios were not significantly correlated with the child's age for either parent group. The responsiveness ratios for the nonstutterers' parents were significantly correlated with the child's age but this was not the case for the parents of the stutterers. Further, for both groups of parents, the request was the most frequently produced utterance type. These results demonstrated that the parents of stutterers and nonstutterers were not significantly different in two important characteristics of conversational interaction with their children.