Disfluency characteristics of Omani Arabic-English bilingual speakers

This study examined the oral reading and conversational speech of eight bilinguals who stutter (BWS). The participants spoke Omani Arabic as the dominant and English as the less-dominant language. The samples were examined with particular reference to the production of overall disfluency, stuttering-like disfluencies (SLDs) and other-disfluencies (ODs) occurring at the syllable and word level. The results indicated no difference in the amount of overall disfluency or ODs between the two languages in either reading or conversation. A significantly higher amount of SLDs were found to occur in words during reading in Arabic compared to English, which was attributed to the linguistic complexity of formal Arabic. A higher amount of SLDs in syllables were found in English compared to Arabic during conversation, although no such difference was found at the word level. The results align with a small body of research suggesting equivalent amounts of stuttering between dominant and less-dominant languages during conversation. The finding of a higher amount of stuttering during reading in Arabic is suggestive of motor differences in the production of the two languages that differentially affect speech fluency.