فهرست نشریات علمی دسترسی آزاد ایران

Background: Given that most research has shown that the severity of stuttering in bilingual children is greater than in monolingual children, this study focused on the manifestation of stuttering in each of the two languages of bilingual children. Objectives: Considering that most studies have shown that the severity of stuttering in bilingual children is higher than in monolingual children, this study focused on the manifestation of stuttering in each of the two languages of bilingual children. Methods: A cross-sectional study included 360 Kurdish-Persian bilingual children and adolescents with stuttering, aged 3 to 18 years, who had referred to a speech therapy clinic and were selected through convenience sampling. Data were collected over three consecutive sessions, 45 minutes per session for each child. Personal information and stuttering characteristics were collected in the first session. Then, stuttering symptoms for each of the Kurdish and Persian languages were assessed through descriptive speech tasks and picture description in two separate subsequent sessions. All stages of the study, from collecting demographic information and taking medical history to performing tasks and extracting data, were carried out by a speech therapist fluent in both Kurdish and Persian languages. In this study, all statistical analyses were performed using SPSS version 24 software. A significance level of P < 0.05 was considered. Also, the chi-square test was used to compare the performance of the subjects between the two languages. Results: The results showed that the frequency of the symptoms of block and pause was higher in Kurdish than in Persian and that the frequency of the symptoms of repetition, prolongation, and filler was higher in Persian than in Kurdish. The results also suggested that these differences were statistically significant (P < 0.05). Additionally, the overall frequency of symptoms of stuttering was significantly higher in Persian as the second language (L2) than in Kurdish as the first language (L1, P < 0.05). Furthermore, co-occurrence of secondary stuttering behaviors was significantly higher in L2 (P < 0.05). Conclusions: To sum up, although a few types of stuttering symptoms were more manifested in L1, overall, the manifestation of all symptoms was higher in L2. This can be attributed to unbalanced development of the two languages' proficiencies that may be partially due to interlanguage complexity and, in another part, may be because of incongruity in some socio-cultural habits. Therefore, separate intervention for each language of bilinguals is suggested.