Paper Title
Stuttering on Content and Function Words In Punjabi-Urdu Speakers
Abstract
Typologically, Punjabi and Urdu belong to the Indo-European languages. These languages are mostly spoken in the
Subcontinent region located in South Asia. It is evident from past studies that the type and severity of stuttering is yet to be
determined in Punjabi-Urdu bilinguals. In this study, the authors investigated the stuttering pattern focusing on the content
and function words in the two languages to see if the bilinguals exhibit the identical pattern in both languages or not. Three
Punjabi-Urdu bilinguals who stutter with ages ranging from 28 to 37 were selected for the study. All were affected with
developmental stuttering as the case history form shows. The spontaneous speech samples of duration 15 minutes were
gathered in L1 (Punjabi) and L2 (Urdu). The first 300 words were extracted from the samples for further analysis. The severity
and types of stuttering were analysed following Keheo (2006) and Ambrose (2006). The participants stuttered more on content
words in more dominant language (Punjabi) as well as in less dominant language (Urdu), whereas they stuttered less on
function words in both Punjabi and Urdu. Further the stuttering severity was observed more in less dominant language (Urdu).
The findings agree to those past studies that report adults exhibit more stutter like disfluencies (SLDs) on content words than
on function words.
Keywords: Bilingual, Stuttering, Content And Function Words