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Sentence-structure priming in young children who do and do not stutter
Julie D Anderson1, Edward G Conture
1Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA.
Summary
Children who stutter (CWS) show slower speech reaction times and greater syntactic priming effects, suggesting challenges in sentence planning and retrieval for fluent speech production.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Linguistics
- Speech-Language Pathology
Background:
- Children who stutter (CWS) may experience underlying linguistic processing differences.
- The sentence-structure priming paradigm is a valuable tool for assessing syntactic processing.
Purpose of the Study:
- To experimentally assess syntactic processing abilities in children who stutter (CWS) and children who do not stutter (CWNS).
- To investigate potential differences in sentence-structure planning and retrieval between CWS and CWNS.
Main Methods:
- Utilized an age-appropriate sentence-structure priming task with 16 CWS and 16 matched CWNS (ages 3;3-5;5).
- Children described line drawings, with speech reaction time (SRT) measured in the presence and absence of priming sentences.
- Counterbalanced order of priming conditions was employed.
Main Results:
- CWS demonstrated significantly slower SRTs compared to CWNS when priming sentences were absent.
- CWS exhibited greater syntactic-priming effects, indicating a different response to syntactic cues.
- These findings suggest potential difficulties in rapid, efficient planning and/or retrieval of syntactic structures in CWS.
Conclusions:
- CWS may face challenges in the rapid and efficient planning or retrieval of sentence structures.
- These syntactic processing difficulties could contribute to the speech disfluencies observed in children who stutter.
- Further research into syntactic processing in CWS is warranted to inform therapeutic interventions.