Exploration of short and long term memory in adults who do and do not stutter

The purpose of the present study is to look at short-term and long-term memory differences between persons who do and do not stutter. Adults who do and do not stutter listened to lists of 12 phonologically related, 12 semantically related, and 12 neutral words. Both groups will be required to recall these words immediately and after a 20-minute time delay where participants were presented with interference tasks. It was hypothesized that persons who stutter would demonstrate lower recall than adults who do not stutter on the immediate recall of phonological lists but that no such differences would be observed for the semantic or control lists. Further, that after multiple exposures to these word lists the initial immediate recall differences will dissipate. Taken together, these predictions would lend further support to the notion that phonological working memory is initially more taxing for AWS. No significant differences were seen on short-term or long-term accuracy rates between speaker groups for the phonological, semantic, or control list conditions. AWS saw a significantly higher rate of increase on performance from first to last short-term trials on phonological condition than AWNS counterpart. This difference was not seen for semantic or control conditions.