Vocal reaction times of stuttering subjects to tachistoscopically presented concrete and abstract words: a closer look at cerebral dominance and language processing.

The present study was an attempt to investigate further the issues pertaining to cerebral organization for visual language processing in the stuttering population. Employing a lexical decision task, vocal reaction times were obtained for a group of 14 stutterers to unilateral, tachistoscopically presented concrete and abstract words. Results of an analysis of variance showed that a significant interaction occurred between visual fields and stimuli. Posthoc tests showed that the right hemisphere was superior for analyzing the concrete words while the left hemisphere was responsible for processing the abstract items. Compared to past data from normal subjects, these findings were interpreted as suggesting that some form of linguistic competition may exist between the two hemispheres, possibly reflecting a disturbance in functional localization in the stuttering population.