Schedule of Events | Symposia

Does the anticipation of stuttered speech involve inhibitory control?

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 29, 2025, 3:00 – 5:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Kien Huynh¹ (kien-huynh@uiowa.edu), Julia Kerrigan¹, Carson Lovig¹, Naomi Rodgers¹, Jan Wessel¹; ¹University of Iowa

Adults who stutter (AWS) can anticipate instances of stuttering. Past work using magnetoencephalography found increased beta-band activity in the pre-supplementary motor area during stuttered speech anticipation. Similar neural activity is found during action stopping, providing indirect evidence for the involvement of inhibitory control during stuttered speech anticipation. However, this purported mechanistic overlap has not been directly tested. This was the goal of the current study. Thirty-one AWS first met with a speech-language pathologist to generate a personalized list of likely-stuttered vs. likely-fluent words. Then, they performed a motor task that required verbal responses to both likely-stuttered and likely-fluent words after an anticipatory delay period. In some blocks of the task, visual stop-signals additionally prompted participants to stop their verbal responses. This design allowed identifying neural activity associated with both proactive and reactive inhibitory control. Proactive control is measurable as anticipatory go-trial activity in stop-signal blocks that is absent in go-only blocks, whereas reactive control is found after stop-signals but not go-signals. Using multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) of whole scalp-EEG, we trained decoders to identify the associated neural activity patterns. A third decoder was trained to distinguish anticipatory delay period activity between likely-stuttered and likely-fluent words. All decoders were successful in identifying the targeted activity. However, cross-decoding analyses found no significant neural overlap between stuttered word anticipation and reactive or proactive inhibitory control. This suggests that stuttered speech anticipation does not involve either of these mechanisms. We discuss alternative possibilities that could explain neural activity patterns found during stuttered speech anticipation.

Topic Area: EXECUTIVE PROCESSES: Monitoring & inhibitory control