ABSTRACT
Stuttering is a well-studied phenomenon ascribed by various scholars to problems that arise during speech planning and/or the execution of a speech plan. This study focuses on self-monitoring, a crucial accessory to normal speech production, as sketched by Levelt (1983, 1989). We propose that stuttering stems from a malfunctioning monitoring process. An experimental study is presented in which the monitoring process was put under scrutiny in dual task conditions. The results indicate that (1) performing a secondary, non-linguistic task during speaking suppresses disfluency, particularly blocking, in persons who stutter; (2) forcing the monitor’s focus toward the lexical content of the output of the production mechanism also reduces disfluency. These findings are explained by assuming that individuals who stutter habitually allocate too much processing resources to monitoring, and that, in doing so, the focus of their monitoring is maladaptively rigid. Our conjecture is that monitoring in stuttering individuals is focused on the temporal flow of speech, in an attempt to prevent any type of discontinuity surfacing in overt speech.
