Visual exogenous and endogenous attention and visual memory in preschool children who stutter.
Stacy A Wagovich, Julie D Anderson, Margaret S Hill
PMID 33032169WHAT IT FOUND
Preschoolers who stutter tracked moving shapes less accurately than non-stuttering peers and remembered them less well, even without language demands.
Both groups did worse when the target was less distinctive.
Key findings
01Children who stutter were less likely than children who did not stutter to correctly track the target shape across the visual attention conditions.
02Children who stutter were less likely than children who did not stutter to correctly remember which target shape they had tracked across the visual memory conditions.
03The stuttering group did not show a larger drop than the control group in the harder visual condition; both groups were less accurate when the target was not visually distinctive.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study compared children at one time point, so it cannot show whether visual attention or memory weaknesses cause stuttering, result from stuttering, or predict which children will continue to stutter. All children had typical speech and language, normal hearing, and no reported developmental or neurological history, so the results may not apply to children who stutter with other speech, language, hearing, or developmental conditions. Most families were upper-middle social class, so the findings may not generalize across socioeconomic backgrounds. ADHD cannot be firmly diagnosed in preschool, and the parent screening was not used to exclude children; when children who scored at risk for ADHD were removed, the main results remained the same, but later ADHD status was unknown. The tracking difference was overall across conditions, but separate comparisons in each condition were not significant, so the result is not a simple difference in the harder visual condition. The study did not test whether changing attention or memory would change fluency.
Declared interests
The supplied article text does not include a conflict-of-interest declaration. The publication type lists NIH extramural research support.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the lower visual attention and memory scores as proof that these weaknesses cause stuttering or that attention or memory problems are the mechanism of stuttering. The study compared children at one time point, did not test whether changing attention or memory changes fluency, and did not follow children to see whether these differences predicted later stuttering persistence.