The Reading Strategies of People Who Stutter (PWS): do PWS use Grapheme-Phoneme conversion disproportionately more than people who do not stutter?

Abstract

People Who Stutter (PWS) have been shown to have divergent abilities in comparison to People who do not stutter (PNS), across a number of linguistic tasks not directly linked to the physical symptoms of stuttering s, such as; non-word repetition (Hakim & Bernstein Ratner, 2004; Ludlow, Siren & Zakira); picture naming (eg. Anderson & Conture, 2004; Hennessey, Nang & Beilby, 2008) and reading (Bakker, Brutten, Janssen & Van Der Meulen, 1991; Bosshardt, 1990; Bosshardt & Nanydal, 1988). The current study proposes that people who (like PWS) find verbal communication difficult („CD‟ group) use grapheme-phoneme conversion disproportionately more during reading than those that do not („CE‟ Group). To explore this prediction a silent reading eye-tracking paradigm was used. Participants silently read 60 experimental sentences featuring a target place name. By manipulating the frequency (high, low and zero) while taking reading time measures it is hoped to highlight time course differences between the groups, consistent with different route usage on the basis of the Dual-Route Cascaded model (Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon and Ziegler, 2001). The results of this study revealed no significant differences in reading strategy between groups.