Recasts in parents' language to their school-age children who stutter: a preliminary study

Language samples collected from 13 school-age children diagnosed as stutterers (CWS) in conversation with a parent and a similar corpus of data collected from a matched control group of 13 normally-fluent children (CWNS) were analyzed for the quality and quantity of recast usage in the parents' language. Recasts, a frequently studied type of child-directed language (CDL) pattern hypothesized to increase the length and complexity of young children's expressive language, have not been studied typically in older children's conversations with parents nor have they been studied in the CDL of parents of CWS. Comparisons of these samples revealed that both groups of parents were frequent users of imitations, as well as simple and complex type recasts. Indeed, the rank order of recast types used was identical for the two groups of caregivers. When parents' conversations with the CWS were analyzed further, it was noted that they were not more likely to focus on stuttered utterances as the utterances on which to base their recasts (i.e., "platform utterances") than on the child's fluently-produced utterances. These results suggest there is one additional conversation parameter for which there are evident similarities in the CDL used by parents of CWS and CWNS. Clinical implications gleaned from this preliminary study are discussed, as are suggestions for future study. EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES: The reader will learn about and be able to describe (1) the role of recasts in young children's language development; (2) the types of recasts that were observed in the conversations of parents of CWS and CWNS; and (3) the similarities observed in the recasts produced by parents of CWS and CWNS.