Bilingualism & Fluency
Hi, my name is Alexis, and I am a speech-language pathology graduate student. I recently did a clinical rotation in a pediatric private practice setting. One of our clients was a 7 year old boy who was bilingual. He spoke Mandarin at home and English in the community/at school. He was in speech therapy for a fluency disorder. How do we, as professionals, differentiate between a fluency disorder and disfluencies accompanied by bilingualism?
Hi Alexis!
You ask a very interesting question.
I love to be a part of discussions on bilingualism and stuttering, especially because I come from a country where almost all of the population is (at least) bilingual. If you’d like to read more on bilingualism and stuttering, I’d recommend articles by Dr. Courtney Byrd, Dr. Santosh Maruthy, Dr. Howells, etc. These should help you get different perspectives on bilingualism and stuttering. A recent systematic review by Chaudhary et al. (2021) is a particularly interesting read. Recent studies on bilingualism and stuttering put forth the exact point that you mention in your question. It is very important to differentiate disfluencies related to the nature and complexity of a language from stuttering-like disfluencies. While the disfluency patterns seen in different languages might vary, you could look for some general trends while differentiating between the two. Disfluencies resulting from language complexity or lack of proficiency might include maze behaviors, revisions, phrase repetitions, etc. These will usually not be accompanied by visible or audible struggle.
In addition, if some additional stimulation is given in that language (usually the second or non-dominant language), these disfluencies (resulting from poor language proficiency) would disappear.
Does that help?
Do ask more questions if you have any!
Pallavi