title: Language and motor abilities of preschool children who stutter: evidence from behavioral and kinematic indices of nonword repetition performance.
abstract: Stuttering is a disorder of speech production that typically arises in the preschool years, and many accounts of its onset and development implicate language and motor processes as critical underlying factors. There have, however, been very few studies of speech motor control processes in preschool children who stutter. Hearing novel nonwords and reproducing them engages multiple neural networks, including those involved in phonological analysis and storage and speech motor programming and execution. We used this task to explore speech motor and language abilities of 31 children aged 4-5 years who were diagnosed as stuttering. We also used sensitive and specific standardized tests of speech and language abilities to determine which of the children who stutter had concomitant language and/or phonological disorders. Approximately half of our sample of stuttering children had language and/or phonological disorders. As previous investigations would suggest, the stuttering children with concomitant language or speech sound disorders produced significantly more errors on the nonword repetition task compared to typically developing children. In contrast, the children who were diagnosed as stuttering, but who had normal speech sound and language abilities, performed the nonword repetition task with equal accuracy compared to their normally fluent peers. Analyses of interarticulator motions during accurate and fluent productions of the nonwords revealed that the children who stutter (without concomitant disorders) showed higher variability in oral motor coordination indices. These results provide new evidence that preschool children diagnosed as stuttering lag their typically developing peers in maturation of speech motor control processes.
  
  
  OBJECTIVE
  The reader will be able to: (a) discuss why performance on nonword repetition tasks has been investigated in children who stutter; (b) discuss why children who stutter in the current study had a higher incidence of concomitant language deficits compared to several other studies; (c) describe how performance differed on a nonword repetition test between children who stutter who do and do not have concomitant speech or language deficits; (d) make a general statement about speech motor control for nonword production in children who stutter compared to controls.
authors.affiliation: Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, Purdue University, United States. asmith@purdue.edu
authors.forename: Anne
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Smith
authors.forename: Lisa
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Goffman
authors.forename: Jayanthi
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Sasisekaran
authors.forename: Christine
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Weber-Fox
mesh_terms: D001696:Biomechanical Phenomena; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D007806:Language Disorders / Q000150:complications; D007807:Language Tests; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D009048:Motor Skills; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D013342:Stuttering / Q000150:complications / Q000503:physiopathology* / Q000523:psychology