Working Memory and Oral and Written Verbal Fluency in School-Age Children Who Stutter

Children who stutter (CWS) often produce fewer words in verbal fluency tasks. This may reflect weaker working memory or time lost to disfluencies during speech. This study compared working memory and oral and written verbal fluency in 30 CWS and 35 children who do not stutter (CWNS). All children were monolingual Turkish speakers aged 8 to 9 years. They completed a standardized working memory battery and semantic, phonemic, and alternating fluency tasks in oral and written form. CWS scored lower than CWNS on verbal working memory, but not on short-term memory. CWS also scored lower in written phonemic and alternating fluency. These differences were large and remained after controlling for the groups’ difference in IQ and their large difference in mean length of utterance. Oral fluency differences were smaller and did not remain significant after correction for multiple comparisons. Because group differences were also found in written tasks, lower fluency in CWS cannot be explained by time lost during speech alone. The findings suggest that verbal working memory and phonemic fluency, particularly in writing, are areas of difficulty for school-age CWS.