Stuttering Facts | Developmental Stuttering Project

For Parents - Facts

At any one time, about 1% of school-age children stutter.
Stuttering typically begins around 2 to 3 years of age, but may start later in childhood.
Boys are 3 to 4 times more likely to stutter than girls.
Stuttering tends to run in families.
Many stutterings include repetitions of single syllables (e.g., “bu-bu-but” or “I-I-I”), prolongations of sounds (e.g., “IIIIIIIIIIII”), and blocks where a person can’t seem to get the sound out (e.g., “……….what?”).
Nervousness is not thought to cause stuttering.
There is little evidence that people “catch” stuttering from others.
Recovery from stuttering in young children, at least half of the time, occurs within 2 years of stuttering onset.
Early recovery from stuttering occurs more often for girls than boys.
Parents do not cause stuttering, but with accurate information and suggestions for responding to it, they can help their children maximize their communication potential.

Infants only a few months old can distinguish between different sounds within a language.
Children are able to segment sounds into words by 7 months of age.
Children say their first words at about 12 months of age.
Most researchers agree that children at any given time know more words than they can express.
Children typically know 14,000 words by age 6.
Complex syntactic constructions such as negatives and wh-questions are acquired during the preschool years.
The stages of language development for bilingual and monolingual children are similar.
Language processing is generally thought to occur in the left hemisphere of the brain.

Children this age are starting to understand that others’ have their own needs and feelings that may differ from their own.
They are growing in their ability, not just to notice that another person is having feelings, but to identify and name those feelings.
Similarly, preschoolers are beginning to recognize the need regulate their emotions and impulses.
They are moving beyond the concrete world of what is right in front of them, and are starting to be able to think and to talk about what is and is not present, and what might may or may not be true.
They also start to see a world of possibilities: truths, lies, ambiguities, and ways to get things both right and wrong.”
They are starting to think about, talk about, and adjust to what another person may be thinking.
Social skills like empathy and fairness also emerge and children begin to have preferred playmates and form friendships.