Spoken language production and childhood stuttering

描述（由申请人提供）：本研究的目的是确定口语产生的中断是否与儿童口吃有关。口吃可能与言语语言产生的计划阶段发生的过程中的中断有关的概念一直是最近几种口吃理论的焦点。要测试的主要假设是，口吃的儿童有困难的词汇和/或句法处理组件。词汇或句法规划和检索过程中的困难可能会导致频繁的犹豫，重复，并在会话讲话，也许是为了“争取时间”进一步的语言处理功能。拟议的研究使用新的，心理语言学的方法，直接操纵的速度词汇和句法激活的儿童谁做和不口吃的年龄之间的3;0至5;11（年;个月）。具体而言，句法启动范式将被用于项目1，以检查句法复杂性的影响，儿童的图片描述延迟，提供有关方面的句法表征的信息。在项目二中，将采用重复启动的方法来考察儿童的图片命名记忆，提供有关词汇-语音形式提取的信息。最后，在项目3中，孩子们将在不同的背景下命名图片，提供有关词汇概念选择的信息。这些项目的研究结果将提供有意义的见解的作用，突出的语言过程中发挥的启动和/或儿童口吃的情况下的原因。

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.