"Traue keiner Statistik, die Du nicht selbst gefälsch hast" :o)

Aber im Ernst. Bin D-F aufgewachsen. Ich selbst hatte nie ein Problem mit Stottern, eher damit, dass ich ein paar falsche Freunde nicht los wurde.
Ich spreche nur aus meiner Erfahrung und will nicht die Statistik wiederlegen. Ich finde es aber ehrlich gesagt erstaunlich. Ich hätte gedacht, dass sie es leichter mit dem Sprechen hätten; außer mit oben genanntem Problem der falschen Freunde.

Mit meinen Geschwistern habe ich immer Deutsch gesprochen, weshalb sie nicht ganz so gut F sprechen können (Verständnisschwierigkeiten hat nur der Jüngste), aber keiner Stottert.

Guess each of us can only describe their own experience, unless there are any experts in bilingualism here (does that exist?).

The article in the link doesn't actually say that bilinguals are more likely to stutter - it doesn't compare them to monolinguals. It says that children who learn both languages before the age of 5 are more likely to stutter at a later age than children who learn the second language after the age of 5.

My two children learned to speak early, and coincidentally both had close monolingual friends who started much later, so I got the impression that bilingualism made them more eager to start speaking early!
Neither was delayed in terms of grammar or ability to express themselves in either language. My daughter was very shy about talking to strangers from about 3-6, but has got over that now.
Today, both still (at 8 and 10) have different vocabularies to their monolingual friends in either language. In the minority language, English, they have a smaller active vocab, although you'd only notice when they have to talk about quite specialised things like types of fish or Yo-Gi-Oh cards :-) Their passive vocab in English is good, especially that of my daughter (10) who reads a lot.
In German, my daughter has always had top marks in school, right from year 1; I can't notice any errors when she speaks (though she notices mine) and I often notice her using phrases which sound very mature. My son (8) usually gets 2s in German, even though I sometimes notice him making little mistakes in German (articles and the like). In English he constantly makes a few mistakes that monolinguals his age wouldn't make ("He did go" and translating German phrases directly), but he sounds fluent and like a native speaker if you don't know any better. My daughter hardly makes any mistakes in her spoken English.

Both my kids (now 10 and 6) started talking slightly later in both languages than the average monolingual. They only got exposed to German at the age of one, in other words at the point where they would normally be coming out with their first words, and I think they spent a year or so 'absorbing' this new language before any of it was activated. However, when they did get going with the languages actively (by 2 and a half, although they could say certain things before that) they generally didn't mix them and clearly knew when to speak what with whom.

My elder daughter had a brief stuttering phase when she was four, which our paediatrician said was not uncommon even for monolinguals and was more linked to her brain temporarily working quicker than her mouth. It disappeared soon enough and she is now completely fluent in both languages. The younger one has never stuttered and at the age of 6 has incredibly clear, precise diction in both languages.

So in answer to your question, it seems to depend on the individual child. However, I wonder if permanent or long-term stuttering could in some cases be related to the child not having 100 per cent command of any one language, in other words not having a real mother tongue, but instead speaking a mish-mash of several badly. Or maybe one of the languages is regarded poorly by society, so that the child is ashamed of speaking it. The same might apply to a monolingual child brought up in a household with poor communication. In other words, it's not the bilingualism itself to blame, but rather the circumstances under which it occurs.

Both my kids (now 10 and 6) started talking slightly later in both languages than the average monolingual. They only got exposed to German at the age of one, in other words at the point where they would normally be coming out with their first words, and I think they spent a year or so 'absorbing' this new language before any of it was activated. However, when they did get going with the languages actively (by 2 and a half, although they could say certain things before that) they generally didn't mix them and clearly knew when to speak what with whom.

My elder daughter had a brief stuttering phase when she was four, which our paediatrician said was not uncommon even for monolinguals and was more linked to her brain temporarily working quicker than her mouth. It disappeared soon enough and she is now completely fluent in both languages. The younger one has never stuttered and at the age of 6 has incredibly clear, precise diction in both languages.

So in answer to your question, it seems to depend on the individual child. However, I wonder if permanent or long-term stuttering could in some cases be related to the child not having 100 per cent command of any one language, in other words not having a real mother tongue, but instead speaking a mish-mash of several badly. Or maybe one of the languages is regarded poorly by society, so that the child is ashamed of speaking it. The same might apply to a monolingual child brought up in a household with poor communication. In other words, it's not the bilingualism itself to blame, but rather the circumstances under which it occurs.

I'm mortified about the double post...

Ein stotternder Löwe passt doch zum Thema... :-)

@ Stephan: And what about 'trilingual' people ? - (Not to talk about those with skills in even more languages) . . .

@ CM2DD (no comparison to monolinguals):
Dass Zweisprachigkeit das Stottern fördert, ist nicht neu. Unklar war bisher jedoch, ob die Kinder in einer oder in beiden Sprachen stottern.
So I'm afraid it's just once again the bad quality of the SZ when it comes to scientific research... just as they don't tell us who conducted the studies, what effect size they found (3.5% as compared to 3%??), etc.

@ yackydar: While the article claims that the view "the brains are quicker than the tongue" is wrong, I generally **love** your hypotheses about possible third variables (other than learning two languages in itself). I mean, we all don't know if your hypotheses are right, but they sound definitely interesting to look into. And I'd like to add general stress factors related to a migration background as another one...

@ Daddy: Actually, I had been wondering the very same thing. :o)
As a matter of fact, I recently heard from a trilingually raised kid that he still didn't really speak any language by the age of 5 (? if I remember correctly), so the speech pathologist told the parents to teach him one language only. Which he then learned fine, before starting again to learn also the other two languages at an older age... As he's certainly not representative for each and every trilingual kid, the question remains...


BTW, do you know which percentage of bilingual kids end up being as good as a monolingual kid in one, both or neither language? (And having a primary/majority language probably helps to be more proficient in that one, but less so than the other?)
I'm sure there are many factors involved, but I'm just curious to get a general sense.

So I'm afraid it's just once again the bad quality of the SZ when it comes to scientific research...
Looking on Google, it seems to have been reported like this everywhere, but the abstract (and the actual information in the SZ) say something else:

http://adc.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/adc.2...
"Participants Children aged 8-12 plus who stuttered (monolingual and bilingual) and fluent bilingual controls (FB). ...
The sample of 317 children had 69 bilinguals (prevalence rate of bilingualism in the stuttering sample was 21.8%). ... "
The full text costs eleven euro, so I don't know what the full results were, but the abstract says they were actually comparing kids who learned a second language simultaneously with English from birth, and those who learned English after the age of 5.

The abstract does not say whether the rate of 21.8% is comparable to the rate of bilinguals in the population of London as a whole (wouldn't be surprised if it was, to be honest), or if they actually deliberately chose to have a higher number of bilinguals in the sample, which would make sense as they were studying bilinguals. (Another possibility could be that they chose a random sample of children referred to speech therapists, but who knows if bilinguals are actually referred more often, as a) parents of bilinguals are more likely to worry about their speech and b) speech therapists might be more likely to consider bilinguals at risk.

The result is that of the bilinguals, the ones who learn the second language later stutter less and for a shorter time. I wonder if in the study they distinguished between those who officially learned English at school, but who grew up in England and had been passively picking it up since birth, and those who arrived in England at age five.

Quote from another study from 2000:
"The only known survey to date on the topic was carried out in the 30s by
Travis, Johnson and Shover (1937). Travis et al. surveyed 4827 children aged between four and seventeen years (mean age 8.54 years) and found that there was a higher percentage of children who stutter in the bilingual population surveyed (2.8%) than in the monolingual population (1.8%)."
The 2000 study doesn't sound wonderfully representative, but it concludes:
"The current study showed that there is no difference between monolingual and bilingual speakers in term of their likelihood of having stuttering in their life."
http://www.speech.psychol.ucl.ac.uk/PAPERS/PD...
Again, this figure may be affected by reporting rates.

@Klorix, #1:

"Verwende kein Zitat, das Du nicht selbst erfunden hast."

Schau mal hier: http://www.statistik.baden-wuerttemberg.de/Ve...

Man sollte sich dessen bewusst sein, dass man mit dem hach so lustigen Statistik-Spruch im Grunde Goebbels zitiert.

My kids were both raised bilingually and had no problems with stuttering. They attended bilingual schools, in which all of their classmates spoke at least 2 languages (some of them 3 or 4), and I can't recall a single stutterer among them. As far as speech development goes, my daughter was quite precocious (with a vocabulary of 15 words at 11 months of age), while my son took his time. I did find their bilingual education to be very beneficial to vocabulary development, as both of them had and continued to have very advanced verbal skills in both languages.

Wo genau steht den der entscheidende Abschnitt, ich habe keine Lust den ganzen Text zu lesen. Beim überfliegen habe ich nur gesehen, dass von beidseitiger Propagande die Rede ist.

Außerdem ist mir komplett wurscht, in diesem Fall, wer das zuerst gesagt hat.
Bei Statistiken ist trotzdem immer das Problem vorhanden, dass von einem Gesamtbild nur ein Teil betrachtet wird. Wenn man also nicht weiß, welche Teile beachtet und welche außer Acht gelassen wurden, darf man seine Zweifel haben und vermuten, dass es auch andere Gründe gibt.
Ich denke auch, dass es nicht gerade schwierig ist eine Statistik in die gewünschte Richtung deuten zu lassen. Man braucht ja nur ein paar Fragebögen weg zu lassen, die einem nicht passen.

Der Ausspruch, egal von wem er stammt, ist also in diesem Sinne absolut zutreffend. Man kann die tatsächliche Aussage einer Statistik nur dann begreifen, wenn man genau weiß, wie sie entstanden ist.

One of my (bilingual) kids stuttered at a young age, but I was told that this was often a normal aspect of the language learning process. It disappeared quickly and has never come back. Nor can I confirm that they learned to speak later than their monolingual peers. On the contrary in fact: One spoke so early she used to freak people out, and the other was right in step with her monolingual peers. Their language skills are still on par with or at times ahead of their school chums in German and, obviously, in English with nary a stutter.

Not that two kids is a very good sample size, nor are the Leos likely to be a good sample group since we all probably enjoy a higher level of education than the general population.

@CM2DD
Ich hab mal in den Methodenteil reingeschaut. Es scheint so, dass die meisten Familien schon vor Schulanfang in London gewohnt haben und dass sie die Kinder dann als "kein Englisch vor 5" klassifiziert haben, wenn in der Familie kein Englisch gesprochen wurde:

The 38 selected children were divided into LE and BIL groups. The LE children may be regarded as not bilingual until the age of school onset. The LE group consisted of 15 children (39.5% of the 38 children) who did not speak English when they started school. During this period, English was not used by the caregivers, there was no replay media over which English was heard and if there were siblings, they did not speak English up to the age of school entry. Twenty-three (60.5%) of the children spoke English in addition to the primary language spoken in the home (BIL group). They were all exposed to English in the home from birth.

(LE - other language exclusively, BIL - other language along with English)

Hm. Also mir scheint, dass sie da selektiv auf eine Subgruppe von zweisprachigen Kindern geschaut haben - nämlich die, die _zu Hause_ beide Sprachen sprechen. Ob das ein Problem ist, weiß ich natürlich nicht, aber ich denke, sie hätten vielleicht etwas gezielter vorgehen können bei der Auswahl der Probanden.

Verstehe ich was falsch? Haben die nur 38 Kinder getestet? Das ist nicht gerade eine statistisch relevante Menge, oder? Wie ist das mit den LE-Kindern wurden die 5 Jahre von der Außenwelt abgekapselt (im Keller eingesperrt), dass die NIE kontakt mit der Landessprache (Englisch) gehabt haben?

Ich kann mir durchaus vorstellen, dass es schwierigkeiten geben kann, wenn die Kinder zuhause die Möglichkeit haben sich in beiden Sprachen zu verständigen. Ich schätze, dass sich dann die Landessprache durchsetzt.

@Klorix
Die Gesamtzahl an Kindern war:
The sample of 317 children had 69 bilinguals

Und von diesen 69 biliguals haben sie dann letztendlich 38 ausgewählt, die dann an der Studie teilgenommen haben.

dass sie die Kinder dann als "kein Englisch vor 5" klassifiziert haben, wenn in der Familie kein Englisch gesprochen wurde:
I wonder if these children grew up in healthy, happy environments in areas of London where you can simply walk the streets without hearing much English, or if, seeing that they had so little contact with English, they may more often have been in families where the parents were shy, felt alienated and scared, or had a negative attitude towards English, which might (I imagine, as a non-expert) affect their children's language skills.
The more I think about this, the more complicated it seems :-)

Zu der weiter oben genannten Frage nach dreisprachigen Kindern:

Ich kann hier nur meine Nichte (8) anfuehren, die mit Deutsch (Mutter), Hindi (Vater) und English (Umgebung) , aufgewachsen ist. Sie hat schon recht spaet angefangen ueberhaupt zu sprechen, wobei die Eltern von Anfang an mit ihr allein jeweils ihre Sprache gesprochen haben und zusammen miteinander Englisch.
Gestottert hat sie nie, allerdings ist sie in Englisch und Hindi fliessender als in Deutsch, und mischt diese beiden Sprache auch fliessend miteinander in einem Satz. Das liegt aber auch daran, dass viele ihrer Freunde diese beiden Sprachen sprechen, sie mehr Kontakt zu den vaeterlichen Grosseltern und diesem Teil der Familie hat, dass diese Art zu sprechen in ihrer alltaeglichen Umgebung ueblich ist und dass sie, ausser bei mir und ihrer Mutter, ihre Deutschkenntnisse eher weniger tagtaeglich anwenden kann. Aber auch wenn sie nicht sehr oft und gern Deutsch redet, ist ihr passiver Wortschatz doch recht gross und sie versteht jedes Wort.

Meine Schwester und ich sind uebrings auch beide 2sprachig Deutsch-Englisch in DE aufgewachsen. Auch von uns hat niemand gestottert. Da wir aber in unterschiedlichen Altersphasen jeweils in unsere zweite Heimat England gezogen sind (sie mit 15, ich mit 25), ist bei ihr Englisch noch etwas ausgepraegter als bei mir. Und sogar wir fangen meist einen Satz auf Deutsch an und beenden ihn dann auf Englisch, besonders wenn es um alttaegliche Dinge geht.
(Beispielsatz von heute frueh: "Ich setze sie bei der Schule ab und fahre dann weiter zum Revenue Office where I will submit the missing papers before (bevor) ich mich mit Judith um 11 zum Brunch treffe.")

@Statisticus: Wenn ich mich recht erinnere, hat Goebbels geklaut; andere Quellen schreiben den Ausspruch Shaw zu. Warum allerdings ein statistisches Amt sich berufen fühlt, ein offensichtlich ironisches geflügeltes Wort als "kein echtes Zitat" enttarnen zu wollen, das auf wunderbare Weise beschreibt, wie die meisten Menschen mit Statistiken umgehen entzieht sich meinen Verständnis. Hat der Herr ein Problem?

I've just finished 3 semesters of external study on on first-language acquisition, biligualism, and bilingual schooling (towards a Masters in Linguistics). There was no mention of increased incidence of stuttering.

Looking at the abstract of the article (#9, Thanks CM2DD): it's a small sample (38 bilingual stutterers), but most important, it's a clinical referral sample - the study looked at children who'd been referred to a speech pathologist. It defined bilinguals as children who speak another language "primarily or exclusively in the home". Just how bilingual a child is at 2 is debatable. So (1) you are more likely to refer your child to a speech pathologist for stuttering (as opposed to other speech problems) if you don't speak English at home and (2) if your young child does stutter, he/she is statistically less likely to improve as fast as a monolingual child.

No real cause for panic: bilinguals often follow a different developmental path in acquiring their languages and the study explicitly says that educational attainment was not affected.

Der Spruch stammt weder von Churchill noch von Shaw, denn sonst müsste es ein englisches Original dazu geben. Im englischen Sprachraum ist die Redewendung aber völlig unbekannt. Wer's nicht glaubt, möge eine Anfrage bei "English missing" starten.

Auch im französischen, spanischen usw. Sprachraum kennt man dergleichen nicht. Nur bei uns bekommt jeder, der mit einem statistisches Argument kommt, unweigerlich diesen saublöden Spruch um die Ohren gehauen.

Goebbels selbst hat die Redewendung in dieser Form auch nicht geprägt. Er hat vielmehr der Presse die Anweisung gegeben, Churchill als Lügner und Zahlenschwindler hinzustellen. Aus den resultierenden Schlagzeilen hat der Volksmund dann diesen Spruch destilliert. Also geht es indirekt auf Goebbels zurück. Und: die ursprüngliche Zielrichtung war eine andere. Nicht gegen die Statistik, sondern gegen Churchill.

both my bilingual sons spoke early and did not stutter, although my oldest (11) now sometimes talks so quickly that his words get muddled up. I have attended several seminars on bi-linguism and haven't heard the "stutter theory" before.

Die Statistik hat auf jeden Fall schonmal einen Rechenfehler drin, wenn ich das richtig verstanden habe.

317 Kinder
69 zweisprachig
38 stottern (2 nur in einer Sprache)

ergo: 31 zweisprachige stottern nicht

angegeben im Text:
"(of the bilinguals who stuttered, 15/38,...)"
"(of the bilinguals who did not stutter, 28/38,...)"

38+38=76

#21 Vielleicht ist in anderen Kulturen das Mißtrauen gegenüber Statistiken einfach schwächer. Und ich wette, dass es genug Leute gibt die sowas wie "Ich glaube nicht an Statistiken" sagen.
... Ich weiß, don't feed the trolls.

Statisticus, im Englischen geht der Satz so: Lies, damned lies and statistics.
Das ist doch schon ähnlich, oder?

47.3% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
- Steven Wright

Ich bin Stotterer UND zweisprachig aufgewachsen (D-PL)... denke allerdings nicht, dass das der grund ist. obwohl ich den grund dazu selber nicht weiß...