Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

With 10 to 20 sounds per second, fluent speech requires extremely skilled motor coordination. Therefore, young speakerswith an immature or malfunctioning speech production system may be particularly challenged by the temporal aspects offluent speech. In the present study, we examine nested temporal bout structure (Abney et al., 2014) to investigate howyoung speakers (children 9-12; adolescents 13-17 years old) who do and do not stutter might differ in their temporalorganization of speech during reading. Allan Factor analyses show that nested clustering of peak amplitudes at shorttime-scales (¡ 300 ms) differs between children and adolescents, pointing to developmental differences in the temporalorganization of syllabic structure. Greater nested clustering at longer timescales (¿ 300 ms 10 s) was characteristic ofstuttering, particularly in adolescents whose stutter risks to persist into adulthood. We discuss these findings in light oftheories of stuttering and the acquisition of fluent speech