The Influence of Phonological Complexity on the Naming Ability of Preschool-Age Children who Stutter

Lee, So-yeon; Sim, Hyun-sub; Shin, Moon-ja; Lee, Soo-bok

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Commun Sci Disord. 2012;17(2): 219-233.

So-yeon Lee^` , Hyun-sub Sim^` , Moon-ja Shin^` , and Soo-bok Lee^`

이소연(So-yeon Lee)| 심현섭(Hyun-sub Sim)| 신문자(Moon-ja Shin)| 이수복(Soo-bok Lee)

ABSTRACT

Background & Objectives
The purpose of this study was to investigate the naming ability in preschool-age children who stutter(CWS). For this purpose, the study examined the influence of phonological complexity on accuracy and speech reaction time(SRT) in the naming task.
Methods
The study participants included sixteen children who stutter(CWS) and sixteen receptive language age matched children who do not stutter(CWNS), ranging in age from 3.7 to 6.11. The experimental procedures involved a computer-assisted picture-naming task, during which each participant was presented with the same set of thirty-four pictures of target words. These words were divided into two subsets and were low versus high in phonological complexity. This study compared the CWS’s accuracy and SRT to that of the CWNS depending on the phonological complexity and identified the correlation between the accuracy, SRT, and frequency of disfluencies and the phonological complexity and age.
Results
The results are as follows. (a) There was no difference in the accuracy of the CWS and CWNS. (b) The CWS showed significantly slower reaction time than the CWNS in each level of phonological complexity. However, there was no interaction effect between the groups and the phonological complexity. (c) There was a significant positive correlation between the phonological complexity and the SRT. The higher the frequency of disfluencies was for the CWS, the slower their SRT was.
Discussion & Conclusion
In comparison to the CWNS, the CWS were inefficient in the naming task even when they named the word fluently. Both the CWS’ and CWNS’ reaction times were slower at the higher level of phonological complexity and the frequency of the disfluencies for the CWS changed depending on the level of phonological complexity. The results indicated that the CWS may be relatively inefficient in language processing abilities when compared to the abilities of the CWNS.