ELSEVIER THE INTERACTION OF BILINGUALISM AND STUTTERING IN AN ADULT DANA L. JANKELOWITZ and MELISSA A. BORTZ Department of Speech Pathology and Audiology University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa The relation between bilingualism and stuttering was examined in a bilingual adult who stutters. Language ability in English and Afrikaans was assessed through the use of cloze and language proficiency tests. Anticipation, adaptation and consistency of stuttering were investigated. Frequency, distribution and nature of disfluencies on narrative and procedural tasks were analyzed according to a modified version of the Systematic Disfluency Analysis (SDA) (Campbell & Hill, 1987). Results indicated that language ability influenced frequency, distribution and nature of disfluencies. The subject was more proficient and stuttered less in his predominant language. Implications for the interaction of language and stuttering were discussed. Clinical strategies for dealing with bilingual stutterers were considered. INTRODUCTION The research conducted by Brown (1945) on rules that govern the occur- rence of moments of stuttering, highlights the close relation between the disorder of stuttering and language. His discovery that the chance for a word to be stuttered grows linearly as the number of specified-linguistic parameters that it contains increases, demonstrated that stuttering is not random, and emphasized the strength of the language linkage. Bloodstein (1974) also provided data on linguistic influences on early stuttering in young children, and Chevekeva (1967) held that stuttering represents a type of lan- guage problem. In this regard, it is interesting to note that there have been many reports documenting frequent association between childhood stut- tering and language disorders (see reviews by Homzie and Lindsey, 1984; Nippold, 1990). Bernstein (1981), Conture (1990), Gordon, Luper and Peter- son (1986) and others have found relations between syntactic complexity Address correspondence to: Ms. M. Bortz, at her current affiliation, Ph.D. Program in Speech and Hearing Science, CUNY Graduate Center, 33 West 42nd Street, New York, NY 10036. J. COMMUN. DISORD. 29 (1996), 223-234 © 1996 by Elsevier Science Inc. 0021-9924/96/$15.00 655 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10010 SSDI 0021-9924(95)00050-N