Differences of Processing Difficulty Between Phrases and Words in School-Aged Children Who Stutter

抄録

Takahashi and Ito (2012) suggested that difficulty in clause-level processing does not affect the frequency of stuttering in school-aged children who stutter. This suggests that they do not experience difficulty with processing of syntactic structures. If this is the case, they may not experience difficulty with processing of phrases, which are smaller syntactic units than clauses, and phrase-level processing will not be more difficult than word-level processing. It is predicted that the frequency of stuttering of noun phrases will not be significantly higher than that of compound nouns. Results show that the frequency of stuttering of noun phrases was not significantly higher than that of compound nouns. There were no significant difference in the loci of stuttering between noun phrases and compound nouns. The results suggest that phrase-level processing is not more difficult than word-level processing, and that school-aged children who stutter do not experience difficulty with processing syntactic structures.