Sentence-structure priming in young children who do and do not stutter

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to use an age-appropriate version of the sentence-structure priming paradigm (e.g., K. Bock, 1990; K. Bock, H. Loebell, and R. Morey, 1992) to assess experimentally the syntactic processing abilities of children who stutter (CWS) and children who do not stutter (CWNS). Participants were 16 CWS and 16 CWNS between the ages of 3;3 (years; months) and 5;5, matched for gender and age (+/-4 months). All participants had speech, language, and hearing development within normal limits, with the exception of stuttering for CWS. All children participated in a sentence-structure priming task where they were shown and asked to describe, on a computer screen, black-on-white line drawings of children, adults, and animals performing activities that could be appropriately described using simple active affirmative declarative (SAAD) sentences (e.g., "The man is walking the dog"). Speech reaction time (SRT) was measured from the onset of the picture presentation to the onset of the child's verbal response in the absence and presence of priming sentences, counterbalanced for order. Main findings indicated that CWS exhibited slower SRTs in the absence of priming sentences and greater syntactic-priming effects than CWNS. These findings suggest that CWS may have difficulty rapidly, efficiently planning and/or retrieving sentence-structure units, difficulties that may contribute to their inabilities to establish fluent speech-language production.

Figure 1

Sequence of events in the no-prime condition (A) and syntactic-priming condition (B); a filler picture in the syntactic-priming condition (C). These pictures are from Webber® Verbs & More! ©1998 by Super Duper® Publications. Reprinted with permission.

Figure 2

(A) Mean speech reaction time (SRT; in milliseconds) in the no-prime and syntactic-priming condition and (B) mean syntactic-priming effects (no-prime minus syntactic-priming condition) for 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children who stutter (CWS; n = 16) and children who do not stutter (CWNS; n = 16). Error bars represent standard error of the mean.

Figure 3

Mean number of accurate responses (includes both fluent and disfluent responses) in the no-prime and syntactic-priming conditions for 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old CWS (n = 16) and CWNS (n = 16). Error bars represent standard error of the mean.

Figure 4

Linear regression lines depict the relationship between (A) mean speech reaction time (SRT; in milliseconds) in the no-prime condition and stuttering-like disfluencies (based on the conversational speech sample), (B) mean SRT (in milliseconds) in the syntactic-priming condition and stuttering-like disfluencies, and (C) mean syntactic-priming effect (in milliseconds; no-prime minus syntactic prime) and stuttering-like disfluencies for 16 CWS between 3 and 6 years of age.