Kurt Eggers

Although bilinguals comprise a global majority, clinical and research practices remain predominantly monolingual. Historically, bilingualism has been proposed as a risk factor for stuttering; however, such claims often stem from studies with significant methodological limitations. Consequently, further research is warranted to clarify the relationship between bilingualism and stuttering. Recent evidence indicates that speech-language pathologists frequently misidentify typically developing bilingual children as children who stutter, with video recordings offering no diagnostic advantage over audio. Our cross-linguistic investigations in Yiddish-Dutch, Turkish-Dutch, and Arabic/French-English bilinguals reveal that children who do not stutter produce significantly higher rates of speech disfluencies than monolinguals, frequently surpassing monolingual clinical thresholds. These findings highlight the inadequacy of applying monolingual norms to bilingual populations. Accurate stuttering assessment in bilingual children requires detailed, language-specific analysis of disfluency types in both languages to prevent misdiagnosis – particularly in young children who stutter and have not yet developed secondary behaviors – and to support informed clinical decision-making.