Are fluency disorders related to language or speech sound production disorders?
Because articulation, phonology, and language disorders co-exist with stuttering, some researchers have wondered whether the disorders are related. When considering questions about potential relationships among speech and language disorders, one first must remember that most children who stutter do not exhibit the various limitations that characterize articulation, phonology, and language disorders. Many children who stutter typically score within normal limits on tests of semantic and morphosyntactic development, and they seem to produce sentences and stories that generally are comparable in structure and complexity to those of children who do not stutter (Ratner, 1997). Those differences that have been detected tend to be subtle, and their significance is unclear. Thus, it seems unlikely that the neuro-developmental processes that give rise to phonemic substitutions, morphologic errors, sentence comprehension difficulties, and so forth, are necessary for one to stutter. It is conceiv
