Stuttering and Sentence Length

The purpose of this study was to determine whether sentence length influences the frequency of stuttering. Fourteen stutterers read, in random order, 20 long and 20 short sentences. The long sentences were constructed by means of additions to the short ones: for example, She learned to swim and She learned to swim in the clear water of the lake. Only the words that the pairs of sentences had in common were compared for occurrence of stuttering. Significantly more stuttering was found on the same words when they served as the initial segments of long sentences than when they stood alone as short sentences. The results seem to give evidence of the role of motor planning, or anticipated motor complexity in stuttering.