Error monitoring in people who stutter: evidence against auditory feedback defect theories

Several theories purport that people who stutter suffer a speech-auditory feedback defect. The disordered feedback creates the illusion that some kind of error has intruded into the speech flow. Stuttering then results from actions aimed to correct the suspected, but nonexistent, error. These auditory feedback defect theories thus predict deviant error detection performance in people who stutter during speech production. To test this prediction, subjects who stuttered and those who did not had to detect self-produced (phonemic) speech errors while speaking with normal auditory feedback and with the auditory feedback masked by white noise. The two groups did not differ significantly in error detection accuracy and speed, nor in false alarm scores. This opposes auditory feedback defect theories and suggests that the self-monitoring processes of people who stutter function normally. In a condition in which errors had to be detected in other-produced speech, i.e., while listening to a tape recording, subjects who stuttered did detect fewer errors. Whether this might signal some general phonological problem is discussed.