Understanding the relationships between language proficiency and spoken fluency

Abstract: Recently, federal funding established a FluencyBank initiative designed to facilitate basic and applied research in understanding fluency development, pre-requisites for oral fluency, and the causes of fluency disorders, such as stuttering. I will discuss how traditional boundaries between "language" and "speech" are becoming increasingly blurred as we move from traditional measures of language skill, such as productivity and error-free production, to more fine-grained measures such as rate and fluency of spoken language, in both children and adults. TalkBank initiatives, such as FluencyBank, disseminate both the tools and data sharing opportunities to advance our understanding of interactions between speech and language.