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Tommy began to use single words at about 11 months and to combine 2 words at 15 months. At 30 months, as he began to speak in longer sentences, he started repeating the first words in sentences. For example, he would ask, "When-when-when Daddy come home?" Tommy's word repetitions continued to occur once or twice in a conversation over the next year as he used longer and longer sentences and learned more and more words. Tommy's grandmother expressed concern that he repeatd words a lot when she came to visit. His mother noticed this happened particularly when Tommy's grandmother questioned him about his new baby brother, the family pet, and what games he liked to play. Tommy's mother also noticed that in general he repeated words and phrases and sometimes said "um" when he was excited and had a lot to say.
Tommy's mother was unsure about what to do, however, because she had read that some hesitation was normal in children's speech and it was best not to call a child's attention to it. She decided to talk to her pediatrician about it at Tommy's next checkup. She was relieved to find out that Tommy's disfluencies were normal for his age and that she had been wise not to correct Tommy or give him any advice about talking.
Over the next year Tommy's disfluencies were less noticeable. He repeated 2- or 3-word phrases more often than he repeated single words and occasionally stopped in the middle of a sentence and revised it. After he was five, he was rarely disfluent.