Stuttering and Bilingualism in Children and Adults

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Stuttering and Bilingualism

From: Gealia Singer
Date: 12 Oct 2008
Time: 15:26:47 -0500
Remote Name: 64.131.188.209

Comments

I am a graduate student in NYU for Speech and Language Pathology and I’m enrolled in a Fluency Disorders class this semester. What drew me to your article is that I am a bilingual speaker in English and Spanish as well. While reading your article, it made a lot of sense to me how a client’s stuttering in both languages would improve simultaneously while being treated at the same time in therapy and in the home. And I understood how monolingual English-speakers could identify an unfamiliar language’s disfluencies. However, from the article, I felt as though it was implied that it is possible for someone who is bilingual to be fluent in one language and not in the other; is it possible for a bilingual speakers to be entirely fluent in one language and stutter/be disfluent in their 2nd language? How is that possible since the brain’s plasticity learns to adjust to someone’s stuttering in order to compensate with the right hemisphere, whatever the left hemisphere isn’t doing linguistically? I would think that would confuse the brain? Does this mean that different language are stored in different sections of the brain? Looking forward to hearing from you! Gealia Singer


Last changed: 10/12/08