| The purpose of this study was to investigate the holistic versus incremental phonological encoding of children who stutter (CWS) and children who do not stutter (CWNS). Participants were thirteen 3-year-old and thirteen 5-year-old CWS matched for gender and age (+/− 3 months) with the same number of CWNS. All participants had speech, language, and hearing development within normal limits, with the exception of stuttering for CWS. All participants completed a picture-naming task (e.g., Glaser, 1992) that required them to name, one at a time, computer-presented, white-on-black line drawings of common age-appropriate objects. All participants named these pictures during three auditory priming conditions (counterbalanced for order): (1) primes consisting of a tone (i.e., neutral prime), (2) primes consisting of the initial consonant and two to six glottal pulses of the vowel transition of the target word (i.e., incremental prime), or (3) primes consisting of the nucleus and coda of the target word, that is, the entire portion except the initial consonant and two to six glottal pulses of the vowel transition of the target word (i.e., holistic prime). Speech reaction time (SRT) was measured from the onset of the picture presentation to the onset of the participant's verbal response.; Findings indicated that for CWNS, 3-year-olds exhibited non-significantly faster SRT in the holistic condition but SRT for 5-year-olds was significantly faster in the incremental condition. However, for CWS, both 3-year-olds and 5-year-olds exhibited SRTs that were significantly faster in the holistic than incremental conditions. Findings lend support to the theory that CWS are delayed in making the developmental shift from holistic to incremental processing of phonological representations and that this delay may contribute to their difficulties establishing normally fluent speech-language production. |
