Usler Evan, Smith Anne, Weber Christine
Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN.
J Speech Lang Hear Res. 2017 Jan 1;60(1):51-61. doi: 10.1044/2016_JSLHR-S-15-0367.
The purpose of this study was to determine if indices of speech motor coordination during the production of sentences varying in sentence length and syntactic complexity were associated with stuttering persistence versus recovery in 5- to 7-year-old children.
We compared children with persistent stuttering (CWS-Per) with children who had recovered (CWS-Rec), and children who do not stutter (CWNS). A kinematic measure of articulatory coordination, lip aperture variability (LAVar), and overall movement duration were computed for perceptually fluent sentence productions varying in length and syntactic complexity.
CWS-Per exhibited higher LAVar across sentence types compared to CWS-Rec and CWNS. For the participants who successfully completed the experimental paradigm, the demands of increasing sentence length and syntactic complexity did not appear to disproportionately affect the speech motor coordination of CWS-Per compared to their recovered and fluent peers. However, a subset of CWS-Per failed to produce the required number of accurate utterances.
These findings support our hypothesis that the speech motor coordination of school-age CWS-Per, on average, is less refined and less mature compared to CWS-Rec and CWNS. Childhood recovery from stuttering is characterized, in part, by overcoming an earlier occurring maturational lag in speech motor development.
本研究旨在确定5至7岁儿童在生成句子长度和句法复杂性各异的句子时，言语运动协调性指标是否与口吃持续或恢复相关。
我们将持续性口吃儿童（CWS-Per）与已恢复的儿童（CWS-Rec）以及非口吃儿童（CWNS）进行了比较。针对长度和句法复杂性各异的可感知流畅句子生成，计算了发音协调性的运动学指标、唇口开度变异性（LAVar）和整体运动持续时间。
与CWS-Rec和CWNS相比，CWS-Per在各类句子中表现出更高的LAVar。对于成功完成实验范式的参与者而言，与已恢复和流畅的同龄人相比，句子长度和句法复杂性增加的要求似乎并未对CWS-Per的言语运动协调性产生不成比例的影响。然而，一部分CWS-Per未能产出所需数量的准确话语。
这些发现支持了我们的假设，即平均而言，与CWS-Rec和CWNS相比，学龄期CWS-Per的言语运动协调性更不完善、更不成熟。儿童期口吃的恢复部分特征在于克服了言语运动发展中较早出现的成熟滞后现象。
