Spoken language production and childhood stuttering

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The purpose of this research is to determine whether disruptions in spoken language production are associated with childhood stuttering. The notion that stuttering may be related to disruptions among processes that occur during the planning stages of speech-language production has been the focus of several recent theories of stuttering. The primary hypothesis to be tested is that children who stutter have difficulties with lexical and/or syntactic processing components. Difficulties with lexical or syntactic planning and retrieval processes could result in frequent hesitations, repetitions, and prolongations during conversational speech, perhaps in an attempt to "buy time" for further linguistic processing functions. The proposed research uses novel, psycholinguistic methodology to directly manipulate the speed of lexical and syntactic activation in children who do and do not stutter between the ages of 3;0 to 5;11 (years;months). In specific, the syntactic priming paradigm will be used in Project 1 to examine the effects of syntactic complexity on children's picture description latencies, providing information about aspects of syntactic representation. In Project 2, repetition priming will be used to examine children's picture naming latencies, providing information about lexical-phonological form retrieval. Finally, in Project 3, children will name pictures within various sentential contexts, providing information about lexical conceptual selection. Findings from these projects will provide meaningful insights into the role that salient linguistic processes play in the initiation and/or cause of instances of stuttering in children.