Friday, April 10, 2009

Is she stuttering?

So, lately I have been wondering if maybe Erin stutters. How do you tell in a child this young?

Right now I'm sharing a bowl of Lipton Teriyaki Noodles with her. Her word for noodle is "noonoe," thought she never just says noonoe. She says "Na-na-noonoe. Na-na-na-noonoe. Noonoe, peese"

She does it when talking about her bears too, or other such things. "Da-da-da beyoh. Da-da-da-da beyoh. Da beyoh." Actually, any time she's using "the" she does it. And with "down" although with down it's not every time. With the other two it is.

Anybody have any thoughts on that? Dad? Audrei?

3 comments:

HRHSpence said...

That repetition is very common among language learners. I'll really have to listen to her in July and see what it sounds like.

I wouldn't worry though.

Telima said...

She's a little young to be worried about it yet. My advice (for what it's worth) is just keep an eye on her, but don't stress about it. She has a lot of time to learn it right. She may just like the way it sounds right now. Katy says "I nee-need!" whenever she wants something. *shrugs* But I second your dad when he says not to worry.

Miss Audrei said...

Brittanie, you are very lucky that you have both a linguistic and a speech-language pathologist to analyze Miss Erin's speech! :o) So, I did some research for you, and she really is just so young to worry much about it. Those are the patterns of stuttering (it's usually at the beginning of a sentence or phrase, and can consist of repeating the first sound of a word or repeating the whole word). However, stuttering usually doesn't start until 2-4 years. And even if she's still doing these little repetitions, about 4 out of 5 kids grow out of it in time because, like your dad mentioned, it's just a part of learning language for some kids. Here are some things for you to look for though as she gets older:

1) does she prolong any sounds? not repeating a sound, but just holding it out? or does it sound like there's a block in the middle of saying a sound in a word?
2) does she blink or look to the side when she's making the repetitions?
3) how many words a day does she seem to stutter on? is it more 10%?

If she had any of these problems at 2 years, then I'll fly out and take a peak at her. Until then, just enjoy her cute little speech patterns- they're so fun! at least for me they are... :o)