Speech and language disorders are some of the most common referral reasons to 
child development centers accounting for approximately 40% of cases. Stuttering 
is a disorder in which involuntary repetition, prolongation, or cessation of the 
sound precludes the flow of speech. About 5% of individuals in the general 
population have a stuttering problem, and about 80% of the affected children 
recover naturally. The causal factors of stuttering remain uncertain in most 
cases; studies suggest that genetic factors are responsible for 70% of the 
variance in liability for stuttering, whereas the remaining 30% is due to 
environmental effects supporting a complex cause of the disorder. The use of 
high-resolution genome wide array comparative genomic hybridization has proven 
to be a powerful strategy to narrow down candidate regions for complex 
disorders. We report on a case with a complex set of speech and language 
difficulties including stuttering who presented with a 10 Mb deletion of 
chromosome region 7q33-35 causing the deletion of several genes and the 
disruption of CNTNAP2 by deleting the first three exons of the gene. CNTNAP2 is 
known to be involved in the cause of language and speech disorders and autism 
spectrum disorder and is in the same pathway as FOXP2, another important 
language gene, which makes it a candidate gene for causal studies speech and 
language disorders such as stuttering.