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Abstract Rationale Morphosyntactic features of African-American English has been well documented. Limited research confirms increased speech disfluencies in adult AAE speakers but not in children. We investigated speech disfluencies in narratives of school-age Black children. Methods Seventy-five 8-year-old typically-developing Black children completed Frog, Where Are You? narratives and the DELV-S which classifies children as having no, some or strong variation from Mainstream American English (MAE). Stuttering-like speech disfluencies (whole- and part-word repetitions, prolongations, and blocks) and nonstuttering-like speech disfluencies (revisions, interjections, and phrase repetitions). We computed two dependent variables: 1. Total speech disfluencies per spoken words; 2. Nonstuttering-like speech disfluencies per spoken word. One-way ANOVA explored differences in speech disfluencies based on dialect variation. Results Results indicate differences in speech fluency between children with no variation from MAE and children with strong variation from MAE. Conclusions Children with a stronger variation from MAE will sound more disfluent based on listener perception which places them at an increased risk for a misdiagnosis of stuttering. This work was funded by a Women of Color Stimulus Research Grant from the University of Houston.
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