PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

Relating stuttering to phonetic-phonological complexity has a long tradition in clinical and psycholinguistic research. Some findings point toward a relationship between stuttering and phonetic-articulatory effort, while others emphasize lexical-representational aspects. In our study, we focus on phenomena specifically arising in the transition from phonological to phonetic-articulatory encoding. Here, abstract phonological segments are assembled to form motor plans for articulation by taking various factors into account. We investigated stuttering in a German word-reading-task using words and nonsense-words starting with a [CV]-structure, manipulating manner and place of articulation of word-initial consonants and their distance to adjacent vowels (transition), vowel length, controlling for word length, syllable frequency and biphone frequency. Results show word length as a robust predictor of stuttering, while the factors transition, manner and vowel length (and their interaction) also played a role. We argue that only such systematic approaches allow insights into the complex interplay between encoding levels in stuttering.