Abstract: Objective To examine the performance of developmental stutterers in processing Chinese character to determine their basic cognitive abilities of Chinese language.Methods The reaction time and error rates of developmental stutterers and fluent speakers were compared when they performed orthographic,phonetic and semantic judging tasks in the manual reaction time paradigm.Results The differences of reaction time in orthographic,phonetic and semantic judgment and the error rates in orthographic and semantic judgment between both groups were not significant(P>0.05);however,the difference of error rate in phonetic judgment between the both groups were nearly significant(P=0.053).Conclusion The only disability existed in developmental stutterers seems to be the in phonetic abstracting or encoding processes,which is partly in accordance with the covert repair hypothesis.

Key words: stuttering, Chinese character, cognitive processing, error rate, manual reaction time