Estimates of functional cerebral hemispheric differences in monolingual and bilingual people who stutter: Dual-task paradigm.

Estimates of functional cerebral hemispheric differences in monolingual and bilingual people who stutter: Dual-task paradigm. Clin Linguist Phon. 2017 Apr 14;:1-15 Authors: Kornisch M, Robb MP, Jones RD Abstract The inter-relationship of stuttering and bilingualism to functional cerebral hemispheric processing was examined on a dual-task paradigm. Eighty native German (L1) speakers, half of whom were sequential bilinguals (L2 = English), were recruited. The participants (mean age = 38.9 years) were organised into four different groups according to speech status and language ability: 20 bilinguals who stutter (BWS), 20 monolinguals who stutter (MWS), 20 bilinguals who do not stutter (BWNS), and 20 monolinguals who do not stutter (MWNS). All participants completed a dual-task paradigm involving simultaneous speaking and finger tapping. No performance differences between BWS and BWNS were found. In contrast, MWS showed greater dual-task interference compared to BWS and MWNS, as well as greater right- than left-hand disruption. A prevailing finding was that bilingualism seems to offset deficits in executive functioning associated with stuttering. Cognitive reserve may have been reflected in the present study, resulting in a bilingual advantage. PMID: 28409657 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics - Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Tags: Clin Linguist Phon Source Type: research