Phonological priming in adults who stutter

Area of Science:

• Speech and Language Pathology
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Psycholinguistics

Background:

• Phonological encoding is crucial for fluent speech production.
• Previous research has explored various cognitive factors in stuttering.
• Understanding phonological processing differences is key to understanding stuttering.

Purpose of the Study:

• To compare phonological encoding speed between adults who stutter (AWS) and adults who do not stutter (ANS).
• To investigate the effect of phonological priming on speech onset latency in AWS and ANS.
• To determine the role of phonological encoding in the speech disfluencies of AWS.

Main Methods:

• Speech onset latency was measured in 15 AWS and 15 ANS during three phonological priming tasks (heterogeneous, C-homogeneous, CV-homogeneous).
• Stuttering frequency was recorded for AWS across conditions.
• Participants responded verbally to visually presented semantic cues, with pre-learned cue-response pairs.

Main Results:

• AWS exhibited significantly longer speech onset latency compared to ANS across all priming conditions.
• Phonological priming facilitated word retrieval for both groups.
• No significant changes in stuttering frequency were observed for AWS across the different priming conditions.

Conclusions:

• Phonological encoding speed is slower in adults who stutter.
• Priming effects indicate efficient word retrieval mechanisms in both groups, despite latency differences.
• The findings suggest phonological encoding plays a minimal or no role in the manifestation of stuttering.