Nonword repetition skills in young children who do and do not stutter

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to assess the nonword repetition skills of 24 children who do (CWS; n = 12) and do not stutter (CWNS; n = 12) between the ages of 3;0 and 5;2. Findings revealed that CWS produced significantly fewer correct two-and three-syllable nonword repetitions and made significantly more phoneme errors on three-syllable nonwords relative to CWNS. In addition, there was a significant relationship between performance on a test of expressive phonology and nonword repetition for CWS, but not CWNS. Findings further revealed no significant fluctuation in fluency as nonwords increased in length. Taken together, findings lend support to previous work, suggesting that nonword repetition skills differ for CWS compared with CWNS, and that these findings cannot be attributed to (a) weak language performance on the part of CWS, or (b) the occurrence of stuttering in the course of nonword production.Educational objectives: After reading this article, the learner will be able to: (a) describe one common means of assessing phonological working memory in children; (b) summarize the performance differences of children who stutter compared to peers on a nonword repetition task; (c) compare the results of the present study with previous work in this area. KeywordsStuttering; Phonological; Nonword repetition; Children Nonword repetition in young children who do and do not stutterAs a group, children who stutter (CWS) tend to differ from their peers in a range of areas, including language (e.g., see Hall, 2004;Weiss, 2004, for recent reviews). Perhaps because differences in the language performance of CWS tend to be subclinical (i.e., not constituting a language disorder), the literature has not focused on the many language-related areas that have been associated with language performance in other populations. In particular, one language-related area that has received considerable attention is the role of phonological working memory in the language performance of children with specific language impairment (SLI; e.g., Baddeley & Wilson, 1993;Botting & Conti-Ramsden, 2001;Conti-Ramsden, 2003;Ellis Weismer et al., 2000;Gathercole & Baddeley, 1990;Gray, 2003;Marton & Schwartz, 2003;Montgomery, 1995a;Munson, Kurtz, & Windsor, 2005). As a group, these * Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Julie D. Anderson, who is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, Indiana University, 200 Jordan Avenue South, Bloomington, Indiana 47405-7002. Electronic mail may be sent to judander@indiana.edu. NIH Public AccessAuthor Manuscript J Fluency Disord. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2008 July 7. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript studies generally reveal that nonword repetition represents an area of weakness for children with SLI.For example, Montgomery (1995b) examined working memory and sentence comprehension in school-age children with SLI and language-matched peers with typically developing language using nonword repetition a...

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

“…Thus far, findings from several recent studies (Anderson et al, 2006;Byrd et al, 2007;Hakim & Ratner, 2004) support the notion that CWS may have difficulties with phonological encoding. However, in addition to the equivocal findings of Melnick et al (2003), there is another study by Arnold, Conture, and Ohde (2005), whose findings do not support the above contention.…”

“…Findings from several recent studies (Anderson et al, 2006;Hakim & Ratner, 2004) provide a preliminary basis for speculation regarding the possible nature of this "mediating factor." These studies revealed that CWS are less successful in their ability to correctly repeat two-and three-syllable nonwords than their normally fluent peers, suggesting that CWS may have difficulty retaining phonological information in working memory.…”

“…The notion that CWS may have difficulties with phonological encoding receives further support from studies that have revealed that CWS may be less skilled than CWNS in their ability to retain phonological information in working memory (Anderson, Wagovich, & Hall, 2006;Hakim & Ratner, 2004). Phonological working memory allows one to temporarily store verbal information so that it can be cognitively manipulated for language processing (Adams & Gathercole, 1995;Gathercole & Baddeley, 1993).…”

Nonword repetition ability of children who do and do not stutter and covert repair hypothesis

“…Results indicated that CWS had signifi cant weakness in terms of number of phoneme errors at trisyllabic nonwords but not on the others. In a similar study, Anderson et al [23] investigated nonword repetition skills in younger CWS and CWNS (3.0 and 5.2 years old). These fi ndings revealed that CWS produced signifi cantly fewer correct nonwords and made signifi cantly more phoneme errors on nonword repetitions relative to CWNS.…”

“…Generally, it has been hypothesized that nonword repetition has emerged as a more sensitive measure of children's linguistic abilities, especially phonological skills. [20][21][22][23] Hence the purpose of this study was to investigate phonological skills in young CWS and also to examine the CRH by measuring a) reaction times (RTs) and b) phonological errors (PEs) through a nonword repetition task involving bisyllabic and trisyllabic nonwords.…”