Relationships among linguistic processing speed, phonological working memory, and attention in children who stutter

Abstract

Relatively recently, experimental studies of linguistic processing speed in children who stutter (CWS) have emerged, some of which suggest differences in performance among CWS compared to children who do not stutter (CWNS). What is not yet well understood is the extent to which underlying cognitive skills may impact performance on timed tasks of linguistic performance. The purpose of this study was to explore possible relationships between measures of linguistic processing speed and two aspects of cognition: phonological working memory and attention. Participants were 9 CWS and 14 CWNS between the ages of 3;6 and 5;2. Children participated in a computerized picture naming task (an index of linguistic processing speed) and a nonword repetition task (an index of phonological working memory). Parents completed a temperament behavior questionnaire, from which information about the children's attentional skills was collected. Findings revealed that the groups did not differ from each other on speed of picture naming or attention; however, the CWS performed significantly worse in nonword repetition. In addition, after partialling out the effects of age, (a) for CWS only, there was a significant negative relationship between picture naming speed and nonword repetition; (b) there were no significant relationships for either group between aspects of attention and picture naming speed; and (c) only the CWNS showed a significant relationship between nonword repetition and focused attentional skills. These results underscore the need to consider the underlying skills associated with lexically related aspects of language production when examining the task performances of CWS and CWNS.

Educational objectives: The reader will be able to: (a) summarize findings from previous studies examining the speech and language performance of children who do (CWS) and do not stutter (CWNS); (b) describe findings of previous studies related to nonword repetition and attention in CWS; (c) compare the results of the present study with previous work in this area; and (d) discuss speculations concerning the relationship between linguistic processing speed, phonological working memory, and attention in CWS and CWNS.