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From: Dave Corey
Date: 11 Oct 2009
Time: 13:18:02 -0500
Remote Name: 98.163.237.149
First, please keep in mind that the approach described is new and my comments should therefore be taken as tentative. Any modification of therapeutic strategies will not be warranted until additional studies provide evidence supporting the relationship. That said, if additional research confirms that fluency and selective attention are related, we might conclude that during speech some people who stutter focus attention on different stimuli than do fluent individuals. Such individuals might benefit from cognitive-behavioral approaches including redirection of attention during speech, either toward some non-speech stimulus or toward features of speech upon which attention is typically not focused. However, before attention training could be used therapeutically, we would need to learn which of the myriad stimuli available during speech might improve fluency when treated as foci of attention. In short, if the proposed relationships are supported, we might improve speech fluency in people who stutter through selective attention training. However, we will not be able to suggest attention-based intervention until we more firmly establish the existence of a relationship between stuttering and selective attention and also understand the nuances of the relationship.