Language abilities of children who stutter

Sa？etak Stuttering is a multidimensional disorder whose development is influenced by many factors – genetics, environmental conditions, personality, emotional development, motor speech abilities, as well as varying degrees of difficulty in language processing. For many years, the idea of a correlation between stuttering and language has inspired many studies, examining variables such as the timing between the period when stuttering generally begins and a period of intensive language development, the impact of linguistic factors (e.g. word position, sentence complexity) on the occurrence of speech disfluencies and the observed delay in language acquisition among some children who stutter. Results of studies examining the language abilities of children who stutter are somewhat ambiguous; some studies suggest lower language abilities and others have not found any difference between children who stutter and their fluent peers. Findings regarding the language specifics of children who stutter provide a better understanding of the multidimensional nature of stuttering and its causative factors, which is especially important for both scientific and therapeutic purposes. The aim of this paper is to clarify the relationship between stuttering and language and to provide an overview of the most important studies examining the language abilities of children who stutter, with respect to individual linguistic areas (phonology, morfosyntax, semantics)