Developmental Disfluency

Developmental disfluency is the normal disfluency in speech experienced by most children as they go through the learning process of learning to enunciate. Children will often repeat syllables when pronouncing words in a manner similar to stuttering. They may often prolong syllables, and display other symptoms common to stuttering. However, most children will outgrow this phase in their language development and it is normally not a matter for concern.

One of the intriguing aspects to stuttering is why some children pass through a developmental stage of stuttering and seemingly overcome it, while others seems to retain their stuttering into later childhood, through teenage years, and then into adulthood.