Age of acquisition and repetition priming effects on picture naming of children who do and do not stutter

Abstract

The effects of age of acquisition and repetition priming on picture naming latencies and errors were studied in 22 children who stutter (CWS) and 22 children who do not stutter (CWNS) between the ages of 3;1 and 5;7. Children participated in a computerized picture naming task where they named pictures of both early and late acquired (AoA) words in two consecutive stages. Findings revealed that all children's picture naming latencies and errors were reduced following repetition priming and in response to early AoA words relative to late AoA words. AoA and repetition priming effects were similar for children in both talker groups, with one exception. Namely, CWS benefitted significantly more, in terms of error reduction, than CWNS from repetition priming for late AoA words. In addition, CWNS exhibited a significant, positive association between linguistic speed and measures of vocabulary, but CWS did not. These findings were taken to suggest that the (a) semanticphonological connections of CWS may not be as strong as those of CWNS, and (b) lexical measures may not be sensitive enough to differentiate CWS from CWNS in lexically-related aspects of language production.

Explicit and Implicit Verbal Response Inhibition in Preschool-Age Children Who Stutter

“…The latter point warrants further explanation. One well-documented finding from the language and memory literature is that adults and children tend to exhibit faster and more accurate performance on behavioral tasks with repeated presentations of the same or similar stimuli (e.g., Anderson, 2008). Thus, if the CWS were reacting to the language processing demands instead of inhibition, we should have seen a reliable improvement in their speed of performance across trials in the two tasks.…”

Effects of word frequency and phonological neighborhood characteristics on confrontation naming in children who stutter and normally fluent peers

“…Pellowski and Conture (2005) found that CWS did not appear to benefit from semantic priming, and Burger and Wijnen (1998) reported that AWS showed weaker phonological priming than AWDNS (but see Burger & Wijnen, 1999, for some contradictory findings). While CWS seem to show generally similar phonological priming patterns to CWDNS (Melnick, Conture & Ohde, 2003), there are some subtle differences (Byrd, Conture, & Ohde, 2007), Likewise, Anderson (2008) found slight differences in identity priming for CWS (speeding response by re-presenting identical stimuli). These results suggest that the phonological representations of target words, or the links between semantic and phonological representations are less well specified in the mental lexicons of children who stutter (Anderson, 2008).…”

“…While CWS seem to show generally similar phonological priming patterns to CWDNS (Melnick, Conture & Ohde, 2003), there are some subtle differences (Byrd, Conture, & Ohde, 2007), Likewise, Anderson (2008) found slight differences in identity priming for CWS (speeding response by re-presenting identical stimuli). These results suggest that the phonological representations of target words, or the links between semantic and phonological representations are less well specified in the mental lexicons of children who stutter (Anderson, 2008). This might imply that there would also be differential effects of phonological neighborhood characteristics on the word retrieval abilities of children who do and do not stutter.…”

The integrity of anticipatory coarticulation in fluent and non-fluent tokens of adults who stutter

“…There are data to suggest that persons who stutter have less specified or rather less robust phonological representations (e.g. Byrd, Conture, & Ohde, 2007;Anderson, 2008;Anderson & Byrd, 2008). Thus, one could argue that it might take more time for PWS to complete the phonological spell-out.…”