Stuttering, language, and cognition: a review and a model of stuttering as suprasegmental sentence plan alignment (SPA)

Extant models of stuttering do not account for the emergence of stuttering at the onset of productive language use; the greater incidence of stuttering during spontaneous speech, on complex sentences, and at sentence-initial positions; the greater incidence of stuttering in bilinguals' 2nd language; the apparent deficiency of stutterers in expressive and receptive language skills; the prevalence of spontaneous recovery from stuttering; and the lack of chronic physiological or articulatory deficits in stuttering children's fluent speech. The author presents a model of stuttering as points of suprasegmental sentence plan alignment (SPA). Such alignment processes occur when, due to on-line sentence production processes, SPAs adopted prior to utterance initiation need to be aligned with revised SPAs. This model parsimoniously accounts for the findings reviewed in the article.