The effect of phonetic complexity on the speed of single-word productions in adults who do and do not stutter.
Courtney T Byrd, Geoffrey A Coalson, Jie Yang and 1 others
PMID 28886431WHAT IT FOUND
Phonetic complexity did not slow single-word naming overall.
Adults who stutter were slower than adults who do not stutter, and complex words were named more slowly only when word frequency and neighborhood properties were high.
Key findings
01Phonetic complexity did not significantly affect reaction time overall.
02Adults who stutter had slower mean speech reaction times than adults who do not stutter.
03For words with high lexical value, phonetically complex words were named more slowly than phonetically simple words.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study included only 30 adults, 15 who stutter and 15 who do not stutter, so the findings are preliminary. The task was single-word picture naming, not connected speech, so it may not reflect everyday stuttering. Only 16 stuttering-like disfluencies were observed, so fluency effects of phonetic complexity could not be analyzed. Eleven of the 15 adults who stutter were receiving speech therapy or had received it, so treatment history may have influenced performance. Many responses were excluded before analysis: 776 of 960 initial responses were usable for reaction-time analysis. The Word Complexity Measure may not capture specific phonetic features such as inter-syllabic consonant clusters, which could matter for adults who stutter. The significant phonetic complexity effect appeared only in an interaction with lexical value, not as a main effect.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that phonetic complexity causes stuttering or slows everyday speech. The main phonetic complexity effect was not significant, and the study used single-word picture naming with very few disfluent responses.