Phonological Encoding in Children who Stutter

Abstract

Stuttering is defined as a temporal disruption of the successive and simultaneous programming of muscular movements required to produce a speech sound or its link to the next sound. Few of the models and theories posited that individuals who stutter were found to have deficits in phonological encoding. The main aim of the study was to check the difference in phonological encoding using phoneme monitoring in silent naming task and to compare between children with stuttering and children with no stuttering. Thirty Four children in the age range of 8 to 12 years who were diagnosed as having stuttering with a severity of mild and above degree of stuttering and thirty four age and gender matched children with no stuttering participated in the study. The experiment included Phoneme monitoring task. The present study was conducted in two phases: Stimulus Preparation and Task Design Programming; Administration of the tasks on Children who stutter (CWS) and Children who do not stutter (CNS) groups. The reaction time and accuracy of the participants’ responses were measured automatically using DMDX software. In phoneme monitoring task, CWS was found to be slow in monitoring the presence and absence of the target phoneme and less accurate when compared to CNS. It can be concluded that overall CWS of the present study experience general monitoring deficits and in specific they experience deficits in phonologic encoding process. The present study adds on to the theoretical knowledge on nature of stuttering in children, especially supporting the psycholinguistic model of stuttering.