Inhibitory Control of Lexical Selection in Adults who Stutter.
Nathan D Maxfield
PMID 32950028WHAT IT FOUND
Adults who stutter showed a larger delay naming pictures with multiple word options than fluent adults, suggesting difficulty selecting words.
However, their general ability to suppress unrelated distractions was intact. This points to a specific language planning issue, not a global attention deficit.
Key findings
01Naming reaction times were slower for pictures with low name agreement (more competing word options) in both groups, but this delay was significantly larger in adults who stutter compared to fluent controls.
02Brain activity associated with inhibitory control during naming was widespread in fluent adults but restricted to a few electrodes in adults who stutter, suggesting different neural processing during word selection.
03Performance on a non-linguistic arrow task, which tests general ability to suppress distractions, did not differ between adults who stutter and fluent controls.
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 per group), which limits the certainty of the findings. The study only tested object naming (nouns), so results may not apply to verb production or sentence-level speech. Very fast reaction times (under 500 ms) were excluded from the analysis to reduce noise, so the findings only apply to slower speech planning processes. The study design does not prove that these cognitive differences cause stuttering, only that they are associated with it.
Declared interests
The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health (N.I.H.). No other conflicts of interest were reported.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that adults who stutter have a general attention or self-control deficit. The study showed that their ability to suppress distractions in a non-language task was identical to fluent controls. The difficulty was specific to selecting words when multiple options compete for activation.