ABSTRACT
Recently, a growing body of research and theory has suggested that linguistic factors such as phonological, semantic and syntactic encoding play just as much of a role in the development of stuttering in children as motoric variables. One prominent theory of stuttering that has received considerable attention is the Covert Repair Hypothesis (CRH) (e.g., Kolk & Postma, 1997), which suggests that stuttering is a by-product of a slower than normal ability to phonologically encode. Although empirical studies have been performed to evaluate the process of phonological encoding, few have systematically assessed or manipulated pertinent variables such as speech reaction time of people who stutter in response to a picture-naming task. To date, those studies of these variables have typically involved adults who stutter, with only two focusing on young children who stutter (CWS). For the latter, preliminary results indicate that both CWS and children who do not stutter (CWNS) benefit from manipulation of phonological segments. However, CWNS demonstrate a significant negative correlation between scores on a standardized test of articulation and speech reaction time while CWS show little to no relationship between these variables. Such findings suggest continued study of the speech-language planning and production abilities of CWS and seem supportive of commonly made clinical suggestions to parents of CWS, for example, to minimize interrupting and to allow more planning time for children’s speech-language production.
