Backward masking abilities for speech and tones in persons who stutter

Abstract

We examined eight persons who stutter (PWS) and eight carefully matched adult, control participants for their ability to identify vowel-consonant (VC) syllables and to detect tones in a backward masking paradigm. Speech scores (percent correct) were obtained in quiet and in conditions with a fixed-level broadband masker with a delay of 0 ms and 300 ms. Tonal thresholds (1000 Hz) were obtained using an adaptive procedure in quiet and with the same masker delays as in the speech conditions. The results revealed significantly poorer performance for PWS for all of the speech conditions, including the quiet condition. Tonal thresholds in quiet and for the condition with a 300 ms delay were identical for the two groups, but, on average, the trend was for higher masked thresholds for PWS than for the control group in the 0 ms condition. The poorer speech results are consistent with the idea that PWS may have less distinct representations of phonemic categories that are revealed in a VC task that lacks a language...