Lexical priming in fluent and with developmental stuttering children

To examine the possible relationship between lexical variables (categorization and naming) and developmental stuttering.

Thirty Brazilian Portuguese speaking children with ages ranging from 7 to 9 years and 11 months participated in the study. We applied a lexical priming paradigm to experimentally investigate whether children with developmental stuttering (Research Group) differed from their fluent peers (Control Group), with respect to reaction time in three conditions - control (without prime); semantically related prime, and semantically independent prime - of two experimental tasks: categorization and naming of the target stimulus.

No difference between groups was observed in reaction time on the categorization task. However, there was a condition effect showing that, for both groups, reaction time was shorter in the semantically related prime condition when compared to the no prime condition. In the naming task, a between-group difference was observed in reaction time, indicating a longer reaction time in the Research Group than the Control Group. There was no condition effect on naming, i.e. the Research Group showed slower reaction time regardless of prime type.

The results confirm the hypothesis that, in children with developmental stuttering, readiness in motor programming of speech is slowed when compared to fluent children. There is no difference between groups when the lexical function does not require speech readiness.