Impact of Emotion and Attention on Childhood Stuttering and its Persistence

Vanderbilt University, Nashville TN

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Abstract

Stuttering has a lifetime incidence (adults who have ever stuttered) of nearly 5% and impacts academic, emotional, social, and vocational achievements of those who stutter (Bloodstein & Bernstein-Ratner, 2008). About 78% discontinue with or without formal treatment (e.g., Yairi & Ambrose, 1999), but for the remaining 1% with this speech-language disorder the negative impact of stuttering can be life-long. There is a critical need to determine variables that initiate, exacerbate or perpetuate stuttering in children close to initial onset to accurately diagnose and effectively treat it in its earliest stages. There is a gap in knowledge about how emotion and variables related to emotion such as attention regulation, impacts stuttering and persistence. To address the gap, this proposal investigates emotional reactivity and regulation and their attentional correlates to determine if they differ in preschool children who do and do not stutter and predict who will recover. The hypothesis, based on published and submitted studies, is that emotional and attentional processes distinguish children who stutter from those who do not and impact stuttering persistence. Three specific aims are: (1) Identify stable temperamental proclivities for emotional reactivity and emotion regulation associated with stuttering, as well as variable situational influences on emotion, during experimental tasks, (2) Determine the association of stuttering with attention and attention regulation (a prominent strategy of emotion regulation), under emotional and unemotional conditions, and (3) Determine if emotion and attention predict persistence. Three related studies are: (1) A cross-sectional study of temperament and children's emotional responses to situational stressors in varied laboratory tasks, (2) A study of children's attention during tasks that challenge attention under emotional and unemotional conditions, (3) A longitudinal study of how emotion and attention regulation combine to influence stuttering and predict which children who stutter will recover or persist. Multiple methods assess emotion and attention (observational, experimental, parent-report, and psychophysiology). This interdisciplinary investigation between developmental psychologists and speech- language pathologists will help determine whether preschool children who stutter differ from fluent peers on emotion and attention and whether these differences predict which children recover. Findings will ground the study of stuttering within a broader context of emotional and attention development and help focus current and future research on issues that inform diagnosis and treatment for childhood stuttering.