The role of selected lexical factors on confrontation naming accuracy, speed, and fluency in adults who do and do not stutter.
OBJECTIVE
The purpose of this study was to investigate whether lexical access in adults who stutter (AWS) differs from that in people who do not stutter. Specifically, the authors examined the role of 3 lexical factors on naming speed, accuracy, and fluency: word frequency, neighborhood density, and neighborhood frequency. If stuttering results from an impairment in lexical access, these factors were hypothesized to differentially affect AWS performance on a confrontation naming task.


METHODS
Twenty-five AWS and 25 normally fluent comparison speakers, matched for age and education, participated in a confrontation naming task designed to explore within-speaker performance on naming accuracy, speed, and fluency based on stimulus word frequency and neighborhood characteristics. Accuracy, fluency, and reaction time (from acoustic waveform analysis) were computed.


RESULTS
In general, AWS demonstrated the same effects of lexical factors on their naming as did adults who do not stutter. However, accuracy of naming was reduced for AWS. Stuttering rate was influenced by word frequency but not other factors.


CONCLUSIONS
Results suggest that AWS could have a fundamental deficit in lexical retrieval, but this deficit is unlikely to be at the level of the word's abstract phonological representation. Implications for further research are discussed.
Newman
Rochelle S
RS
Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, University of Maryland, 0100 Lefrak Hall, College Park, MD 20742, USA. rnewman@hesp.umd.edu
Bernstein Ratner
Nan
N
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010700:Phonetics; D011930:Reaction Time; D012720:Severity of Illness Index; D013342:Stuttering / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000503:physiopathology*; D013997:Time Factors; D014705:Verbal Behavior; D014825:Vocabulary