چکیده:
Objectives:Stuttering is one of the most prevalent speech and language disorders. Symptomology of stuttering has been surveyed from different aspects such as biological, developmental, environmental, emotional, learning and linguistic. Previous researches in English-speaking people have suggested that some linguistic features such as word meanings may play a role in the frequency of speech non-fluency in people who stutter. The aim of this study was to determine the effect of word meanings on the frequency of dysfluency in Persian-speaking adults with developmental stuttering. Method:This cross-sectional descriptive-analytic study was performed on 14 adults who stuttered. Their average age was 25 years. The frequency of non-fluency instances was evaluated upon reading two lists containing 60 words and 60 non-words. The words were selected on the basis of common Persian syllable structures. ‘Kolmogoro-Smirnov one sample test’ and paired t-test was used to analyze data the significance level was set at P < 0.05. Results:There was a significant difference between the dysfluency in word and non-word lists (p<0.05). Conclusion:The findings of this study indicate a significant increase in the frequency of dysfluency on non-words than on real words. It seems that the phonological encodingprocess of non-word reading is much more complex than for word reading, because, in non-word reading, the component of semantic content retrieval (word meaning) is missing when compared to word reading.
خلاصه ماشینی:
Previous researches in English-speaking people have suggested that some linguistic features such as word meanings may play a role in the frequency of speech non-fluency in people who stutter.
The aim of this study was to determine the effect of word meanings on the frequency of dysfluency in Persian-speaking adults with developmental stuttering.
Simply put: the difference in frequency of speech dysfluency between content and function words is based on the assumption that function words do not carry full lexical meaning but have a grammatical or function role, whereas content words play a crucial role in conveying semantic information (22).
Thus, if one were to best isolate the influence of word meaning on frequency of speech dysfluencies, dichotomized reading passages or lists consisting of words and non-words might be employed.
have used reading ‘passages’ in adults who stutter, to compare the frequency of speech dysfluencies between passages that consisted of either words or non-words (28, 29).
In spite of the importance of word meaning in the frequency of speech dysfluency in adults with developmental stuttering, to our knowledge, no study has been conducted in this field in Iran yet.
Then participants were given two lists containing 60 words and 60 non-words to determine the effect of word meaning on the frequency of speech dysfluency in the reading task.
The result of the paired T-test indicated a significant difference in frequency of speech dysfluencies when comparing the two lists of words and non-words (P=0.
Moreover, this finding is consistent with Dayalu study that showed an increase in frequency of speech dysfluencies on non-words than words (28).