Efficacy of attention regulation in preschool-age children who stutter: A preliminary investigation

Abstract

PurposeThis preliminary investigation assessed the attentional processes of preschool-age children who do (CWS) and do not stutter (CWNS) during Traditional cueing and Affect cueing tasks. MethodParticipants consisted of 12 3- to 5-year-old CWS and the same number of CWNS (all boys). Both talker groups participated in two tasks of shifting and focusing attention: (a) Traditional cueing and (b) Affect cueing. The Affect cueing task was preceded by stress-heightening instructions intended to influence participants’ emotionality. In both tasks participants provided non-speech motor responses (i.e., button pressing) to computer-presented target stimuli. Targets were preceded by a visual cue (i.e., highlighted box) occurring in the same (i.e., Valid trials) or opposite (i.e., Invalid trials) location as the target stimuli. Reaction times (RT) were measured (in ms) from the onset of the target stimuli to the onset of the non-speech motor response. Errors were tallied for both experimental conditions and were categorized by type. ResultsFindings of this preliminary investigation indicated that there were no significant between-group differences in RT or frequency of erroneous responses. There were differences in error type that were correlated with RT for both CWS and CWNS when stress-heightening instructions were introduced. ConclusionPreliminary findings suggest that speed of attentional disengaging, shifting and re-engaging does not differ between preschool-age CWS and CWNS during the experimental paradigm employed in this study and that introducing stress-heightening instructions does affect components of performance for both preschool-age CWS and CWNS. Caveats for the present study include a limited sample size of young preschool-aged children as well as methodological concerns.Learning outcomes: Readers will be able to: (1) Define attention regulation and describe findings that investigate the role of attention regulation in developmental stuttering of preschool-age children; (2) Describe the components of attention regulation employed during a Posner Cueing Task; (3) Describe the findings of the present study in relation to other studies investigating attention regulation and developmental stuttering in preschool-age children.