Effect of syntactic structure on speech production in adults who stutter

This study examined (a) the effect of syntactic structure on speech fluency and speech reaction time (SRT) in adults who stutter, (b) the effect of syntactic priming on fluency in those participants. Fourteen persons who stutter (PWS) and fourteen persons who do not stutter (PWNS) participated in the study. A sentence structure priming paradigm was used to elicit sentences of varying syntactic forms (i.e., transitive, dative, and two-clause).;The results of the fluency analyses indicated that (a) PWS produced significantly more 'repetitions and prolongations' per response than PWNS, (b) all participants produced a comparable number of 'other' types of disfluencies (e.g., interjections and revisions), (c) all participants seemed to produce more fluent responses following transitive pictures and fewer fluent responses following two-clause pictures.;The results of the priming analyses indicated that (a) the presence of passive primes did not significantly increase the probability of using passives in the response, (b) the structure of the dative primes affected the probability of using those structures in the response differently between the study groups. Specifically, the PWS produced significantly more prepositional-dative responses following prepositional dative primes than following object-complement primes; however, no significant differences among the effect were observed in the PWNS. This finding was taken to suggest that priming dative sentence forms for the PWNS might be more driven by the structural aspects of the available options and for the PWS by the thematic aspects, and (c) the presence of the embedded primes did not significantly increase the probability of using embedded structures in the responses.;The results of the SRT analyses indicated (a) no significant differences between the two groups in SRT, (b) that the syntactic structure of the response did not affect SRT differently between the two groups, and (c) all participants produced transitive responses at a significantly shorter SRT than dative responses, and dative responses at a significantly shorter SRT than two-clause responses. The results of the SRT were taken to suggest that increasing the syntactic complexity of the responses may influence the time both the PWS and the PWNS may need to generate such responses.