Phonological and Semantic Contributions to Verbal Short-Term Memory in Young Children With Developmental Stuttering

Purpose The purpose of this study was to examine the verbal short-term memory skills of children who stutter (CWS) and children who do not stutter (CWNS) in 2 experiments, focusing on the influence of phonological and semantic similarity. Method Participants were 42 CWS and 42 CWNS between the ages of 3;0 and 5;11 (years;months). In Experiment 1, children completed the phonological similarity task, in which they listened to lists of phonologically similar and dissimilar words and then repeated them when signaled to do so. In Experiment 2, children completed another forward span task, the semantic category task, which is similar to the phonological similarity task, except that it consisted of lists of semantically homogeneous and heterogeneous words. Main dependent variables were cumulative memory span, proportion of errors by type, and speech reaction time (SRT) for correct responses. Results The CWS exhibited significantly shorter memory spans for phonologically dissimilar words and were less affected by...