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From: Dave Corey
Date: 05 Oct 2009
Time: 12:16:56 -0500
Remote Name: 98.163.237.149
Hi Judy, Thanks for your interest; all of your questions are interesting. Right now we unfortunately don't have many answers. Although there is evidence that auditory processing and attention are related to stuttering, we don't know how or why. For that matter, we haven't confirmed that auditory processing and attention _are_ central to stuttering. My research is largely oriented around simply deciding whether this is the case. In other words, all of what I write about the role of attention in stuttering should be taken as tentative. So far, my results are consistent with a role for attention, but a lot more work needs to be done before we can be confident of whether attention is important and how it is related to stuttering. Your comments on behavioral therapies are interesting and highlight some inconsistencies in our knowledge that require exploration. For example, people who stutter seem to stutter more when they attend to their own speech. On the other hand, DAF would seem to draw attention to one's own speech, yet still reduces dysfluencies in people who stutter. One possibility is that "attention to speech" does not necessarily mean attention to the _sound_ of speech. Perhaps when people who stutter "attend to speech," they are attending to muscular and proprioceptive aspects of speech rather than to the sound of speech. If this is the case, then altered auditory feedback may improve speech by drawing _auditory_ attention to speech. In therapy, when we ask people who stutter to attend to certain speech characteristics, are we asking that they attend to the sound of speech? To the sensations associated with producing speech? To the act of producing speech? Questions like these are of special interest to me and I hope that my research will help us better understand how we should frame strategic treatments. Best, Dave