Use of a phoneme monitoring task to examine lexical access in adults who do and do not stutter.
Timothy A Howell, Nan Bernstein Ratner
PMID 29454469WHAT IT FOUND
Adults who stutter showed no significant difficulty accessing verbs versus nouns.
However, they made significantly more errors when monitoring for phonemes in the middle of words compared to the start. This suggests a specific weakness in processing word-internal sounds rather than general lexical retrieval.
Key findings
01Participants who stutter did not show a disproportionate difficulty in monitoring for phonemes in verbs compared to nouns, contradicting the hypothesis that verb lexicalization is a primary deficit.
02Participants who stutter had significantly lower accuracy when monitoring for target phonemes located in the medial (middle) position of words, while accuracy for word-initial targets was comparable to controls.
03Reaction times for monitoring verbs were slower than nouns for both groups, indicating a general linguistic effect rather than a stuttering-specific deficit.
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 (15 per group), which limits statistical power. The AWS group had predominantly mild stuttering severity (mean SSI-4 score indicating 'very mild' to 'moderate'), so findings may not apply to those with severe stuttering. The stimuli were simple, single-syllable words with early age of acquisition, which may not have been difficult enough to reveal broader lexical processing deficits. The task required a button press, and while no motor differences were found, the lack of a baseline non-linguistic motor task means subtle motor response biases cannot be fully ruled out.
Declared interests
The authors declare no conflicts of interest. Funding sources are not explicitly detailed in the provided text segments beyond participant compensation.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that adults who stutter have a specific deficit in verb retrieval. The study found that verb processing difficulties were not significantly different between stutterers and non-stutterers. The significant finding was related to phoneme position (medial vs. initial), not part of speech.