What is it about?
The performance of committing words to memory should not be affected by whether one stutters or not. However, it turned out untrue during a working memory task that requires reading sentences aloud concurrently. Working memory comprise three, mostly independent, subcomponents of phonological (verbal) loop, visual-spatial scratch pad (imagery), and episodic buffer (story), and central executive, which controls the resource assignment of the three subcomponents. The working memory capacity (WMC). can be measured, for example, in terms of how many words are remembered temporarily. In reading span test (RST), underlined target words should be remembered while reading sentences aloud that contain those words. The cause of the smaller WMC of People who stutter (PWS), as measured with RST, was attributed to their predominant employment of a verbal strategy in memorizing words, because the WMC deficit was mitigated by substituting an imagery or scripting strategy.
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Why is it important?
Fluent speech requires coordination of multiple levels of skills (social, cognitive, linguistic, and speech motor control) and sufficient working memory capacity (WMC). Committing target words to phonological loop is inefficient because oral reading interferes with phonological loop in RST. However, that is what most PWS resorted to during RST, and more strangely, it is not that they could not use visual strategy because they successfully switched strategies when they were instructed so, with increased measured WMC. The results suggest that PWS have tendency to prioritize phonological loop of working memory even though it is not the best strategy overall. It may be related to their habitual attention to their utterances (speech motor aspect) for the fear of stuttering. Advising to attend to imagery and/or scripting strategy during speech could result in improvement of oral communication ability of PWS by increasing WMC.
Perspectives
PWS often complain that they cannot say what they want to say because of stuttering. The present paper reveals that at least part of its reason is the decreased WMC, which may be rather surprising. Use of non-native, non-fluent language is accompanied by a temporary decline of thinking ability (Takano & Noda, 1993). The present investigation of the strategies of PWS in RST leads to a hypothesis that PWS may be using phonological loop also in thinking and remembering what they have to say, which would be interfered with their attention to motor speech control during speaking, vise versa. Resorting to imagery strategy and disregarding fluency (or fear of disfluency) improve oral reading of PWS instantly in our clinic.
M.D., Ph.D. Koichi Mori
National Rehabilitation Center for Persons with Disabilities, Japan
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Disfluencies and Strategies Used by People Who Stutter During a Working Memory Task, Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, March 2020, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA),
DOI: 10.1044/2019_jslhr-19-00393.
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