Cognitive control of action naming in adults who stutter.
Nathan D Maxfield
PMID 33667938WHAT IT FOUND
Adults who stutter took longer to name actions with ambiguous labels than typically fluent adults.
Unlike fluent speakers, they did not show brain activity linked to general inhibition, but relied on focal attention and individual differences in selective inhibition to manage the competing word options.
Key findings
01Naming reaction times were longer for low-agreement action pictures in both groups, but the effect was larger in adults who stutter (67.64 ms) than in typically fluent adults (39.64 ms).
02Frontal-central N2 brain activity, associated with nonselective inhibition, was present in typically fluent adults for both high- and low-agreement naming but was absent in adults who stutter.
03Adults who stutter showed a frontal-central positivity (P3a) for low-agreement action naming, suggesting engagement of focal attention, which was not seen in typically fluent adults.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The sample size was small (12 participants per group), limiting generalizability. The study was a laboratory experiment measuring brain activity and reaction times, not a clinical trial of treatment efficacy. The groups may have differed in their ability to map the target labels to the pictures, as the labels were not necessarily the preferred names for all participants. The study did not directly measure speech fluency or stuttering frequency during the naming task, only reaction times and neural correlates.
Declared interests
The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health (N.I.H., Extramural). The author declared no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret these findings as evidence that verb naming therapy will improve fluency. The study describes underlying cognitive mechanisms and neural differences in a small group of adults; it does not test any intervention or report clinical outcomes for speech production.