Abstract
Literature reports that in children and adults, individuals with stuttering perform poorly on phonological processing tasks, and syntactic abilities when compared to age-matched individuals with no disfluencies. The present study focuses on phonological and syntactic processing abilities among adolescents with disfluencies. The abilities were also compared to age-matched peers with no dysfluency. The prospective comparative study involved 32 participants, comprising two groups of 16 adolescent (11-19 years of age) participants each. One group consisted of adolescents with disfluencies and the other group included typically fluent adolescents. English was their second language. Four tasks measuring phonological and syntactical processing were administered to all participants. Tasks administered were: Rhyme judgment task in L2, Phoneme blending task in L2, Phonological memory task (repetition of nonwords in L2), and evaluation of syntactic and semantic appropriateness of sentences. Scores of the Control group and adolescent group with stuttering were compared using independent t test. Statistically significant differences were seen for all the tasks. The accuracy and time taken for completion of these tasks were compared across both the groups. Adolescents who stutter exhibited impaired performance on phonological and syntactic processing tasks while their fluent counterparts did not. The findings were similar to those of studies on children and adults with stuttering. Adolescent individuals with stuttering exhibit poorer performance on speech processing tasks such as rhyme judgment, syntactical judgment, and non-word repetition.
Keywords: Adolescents, Disfluencies, Phonological, Processing, Stuttering, Syntactical.