Influence of narrative task on linguistic fluency in syntactic cluttering

Abstract

Speech and language pathologists frequently observe that speech of some clients who meet the characteristics of cluttering is less disorganized and contains more fluent complex linguistic structures during retelling a memorized story than in their spontaneous speech. This study explores the effect of these two narrative conditions on linguistic fluency and revision accuracy in speakers with syntactic cluttering and with phonologic cluttering. Speech samples of 12 participants with exclusively characteristics of syntactical cluttering, 13 participants with phonologic cluttering and 16 controls, in both conditions, were analyzed for frequency of non stutter-like disfluencies, morpho-grammatical and semantic errors and percentage of successfully revised errors. Participants with syntactic cluttering and with phonologic cluttering produced less non stutter-like disfluencies during retelling a memorized story. Participants with syntactic cluttering also were more accurate in revising errors in the retelling condition. However, comparison of the effect of the task between the groups yielded no evidence for a different influence of narrative task between groups. Analysis of the effect of the task in each separate group indicates that influence of the task might be stronger for people with cluttering. The findings support the assumption that the imposed topics and story structure of a retelling task facilitate linguistic planning for people who clutter. It is supposed that in a retelling task they are able to allocate more attention to their not fully automatized grammatical encoding process and to monitoring internal and overt speech. This improves their linguistic fluency and accuracy in revising errors on word and sentence level. It remains inconclusive whether this effect is specific for people with syntactic cluttering. This study also addresses the way the different measures differentiate between the groups. People with syntactic cluttering produced more non stutter-like disfluencies, more errors and were less accurate in revising errors in both conditions. These differences proved to be significant for the frequency of errors in spontaneous speech of people with syntactic cluttering compared to controls.